Julian Dorey Podcast - #62 - Terence Jones: THE OPIOID CRISIS & SUBOXONE; THE FLAWED SENTENCING SYSTEM; NUANCE & THE SOPRANOS; THE PRESIDENT PEDESTAL

Episode Date: August 25, 2021

Terence Jones is an activist, law student, community organizer, and long-time advocate for Civil Rights/Social Justice organizations including the NAACP. Currently, he serves as a Program Facilitator with the Alternatives to Violence Project—where he works with prison inmates to foster anti-aggressive behaviors. ***TIMESTAMPS*** 6:04 - Terence tells a story about a car crash with a cop; The Student Debt Crisis; The lack of Financial Literacy in America 27:48 - The Opioid Crisis and Terence’s work in Opioid Clinics; Suboxone and drugs that ween addicts off of heroin; The motivations of a drug addict to use drugs; Drug Legalization Debate;  1:00:23 - The types of people who work at Drug Addiction Clinics; Pharma Companies and kickbacks to judges for drug recommendations 1:17:18 - Julian tells a story about a Big Pharma Marketing Team; The dangerous combination of Groupthink and Marketing in large entities; The problem with the Criminal Prosecution & Criminal Sentencing Systems; Julian & Terence discuss Malcolm Gladwell’s “AI Bail” study in “Talking To Strangers”; Julian tells a story about a surreal courtroom scene 1:50:44 - Terence emphasizes the need for nuance in society using “The Sopranos” as a symbol; Why Tony Soprano was relatable; The timelessness of another HBO show,  “The Wire”; Terence defines what Patriotism should really mean;  Terence and Julian debate putting Presidents on a pedestal given the examples of Obama & Trump in recent years; Steven Pinker, The Wealth Gap -- and the  symbolism of the political movements of the 2010s.  2:27:53 - The Afghanistan Crisis; The ridiculous expectation we have that Presidents know about everything; The irony of Trump having success because he knew very little 2:45:29 - The politicization of young kids; Cancel Culture; The ACLU and allowing all speech ~ YouTube EPISODES & CLIPS: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0A-v_DL-h76F75xik8h03Q  ~ Get $100 Off The Eight Sleep Pod Pro Mattress / Mattress Cover: https://eight-sleep.ioym.net/trendifier  Julian's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey  ~ Beat provided by: https://freebeats.io  Music Produced by White Hot Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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also known as one of the originals of this podcast, along with Sidney DiBernardo. And I say that because Terrence was episode number 10, and I launched September 15th, 2020 with 10 episodes. So he was one of those. And he was the first guy who came in here and really got the wheels turning on the long form conversational podcast that I was always dreaming of going to. And so without him and without that episode, because it was very, very important. I don't know if we'd be here today. Now, this time around, I actually know what I'm doing. And I didn't have to rely on him putting on an absolute

show 24 seven for not 24 seven, but for the entirety of the conversation. And so it was nice and comfortable. And it was just an amazing, amazing follow-up. This conversation went all over the place. Terrence told a lot of amazing stories. I'm not even going to get into his background. You can read the bio, but this dude's the best. Walks the talk, sees the nuance in situations, and somebody I've known forever who's just an amazing, amazing guy. So you're going to enjoy this one straight up. Like I promise you, you will enjoy it. Now, if you have not used the link in my description along with the code TRENDIFIRE at checkout to get $100 off either your 8 Sleep Pod because it comes in queen or king sizes, and it goes right on top of your existing mattress, and it's half the price of the your sleep around you for the night such that when

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are on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. And if you're on YouTube right now, hit that subscribe button, hit that bell button, and leave a like and comment on the video if you would please Now a little announcement here and a big thank you to you guys this past week We peaked at number 29 in the United States of America on the Apple podcast personal journals chart So for those of you who don't know what that means there are 10 or I think like 15 Categories of podcasts that you can be in. So our category is society and culture. And within those categories, there's probably a total across all of them of maybe like 50 or 60 subcategories. One of those is personal journals, which I think is a pretty big one. And we were number 29. So I've been telling you that I've been blown away by how the audio

side of this has grown consistently since day one of this podcast, and that is proof right there. So thank you to all of you who have been word of mouth sharing this thing and supporting. It's incredible. I love the community that's being built. I'm going to try to figure out some more ways to get everyone involved together. Stay tuned there. But also, if anyone has advice on how to grow YouTube, I am all ears. I post on YouTube every single day for the first five months of the year, and I feel very good about the

content and the style and what I've been able to do there, because I've also tested some of that content on other platforms and done well. But I'm pretty clueless on how to generate engagement, like on the YouTube platform, no matter what I've studied, I'm not good at it. So if anyone has advice on that, once again, would love to hear it. And eventually we'll catch that up. I'm grateful the audio has been a consistent great spot literally since this podcast began. And so that stayed the same and eventually YouTube will get there. So to all of you who have supported that, once again, thank you. Thank you to all the people on TikTok who have found the podcast and eventually youtube will get there so to all of you have supported that once again thank you thank you to all the people on tick tock who have found the podcast and supported

there i've never asked for it so that makes it even more amazing that all the shares you guys give i know sometimes it's randos giving shares too who don't follow me or really don't know who i am but there have to be a lot of you in the following who continue to share the clips from TikTok and spread them around and comment and make them go. So thank you to all of you. It's amazing. And what we've been able to do here early on is – I mean I couldn't do it without you. So I know I say that a lot, but I'm never going to tire from saying that. It is the entire truth, and I really, really appreciate all you guys.

That said, you know what it is. I'm Julian Dory and this is Trendify. facts everyone understands this but few seem to do it if you don't like the status quo start asking questions like i'm not you shouldn't say like i see what you're saying i'll give you a little bit pushback because i look at it as a chicken and the egg argument where I don't know that it's necessarily the lawyers that are at fault in this risk assessment as much as human nature and greed. And you see it all the time with accidents. I'll never forget, I got into a car accident in Baltimore, and I was coming down. I was pretty much on my college campus.

It's a bad start. Baltimore car accident. With a cop. How about that? Oh, no. I got to hear this one. I'm in my car. There's a CVS here. I'm in the right lane. I'm going to make a right. There's a

huge pothole right here. I come into the left lane. I'm young and and dumb i know now that this was not a smart move you were young and dumb no i was i was i know you would never tell when you were telling that story about that guy and how he was i won't say his name is to not out him but how he was a savage in college i just started thinking about all my college stories and how i had to bury my alter ego uh and leave him in college. I just started thinking about all my college stories and how I had to bury my alter ego and leave him in college. I promised my fiance that that stage was behind me. So there's a pothole in this right lane. So I go around in the left, and then I'm going to make a right turn into the CVS, which was on the right-hand side. And in the short time that I go to the middle lane and come back around, this cop comes speeding up.

Oh, the cop hit you. And so technically I hit the cop because I'm making a right-hand turn from the middle lane. And he has the right-of-way in the right lane. And so he slams on his brake and goes up onto the sidewalk. And I hit my brake. And I kid you not, and for the viewers, you'll be able to see my hands and what I'm doing, but I kid you not. I literally nicked him. Like, like my head didn't jerk. None of that very, I nicked him.

There was no damage. So when you hit a cop, they have the investigation unit come out. I have to sit there for hours because we're basically on, on camp, on, on campus. We had campus security there. And because we're basically on campus. We had campus security there, and I was glad campus security there because they kind of had my back. It felt good to have somebody on your side because there was like three, maybe four cop cars that came, and then the investigation unit who's there taking pictures of the whole thing. No damage to my car.

The only damage to his car was that I'm guessing that what i hit was his uh whatever light you call that you know how they have like that spotlight on the side some of the cop cars oh yeah like light on the side like that like yeah yeah that light was a little crooked or whatever pretty much no damage i'm thinking okay they'll you know they'll do whatever they do reckless like i'm thinking i'm gonna get a ticket or whatever, take the badge number down, get all that stuff. And a few months later, I get a piece of mail, and it's like, oh, yeah, you're being sued. This officer hasn't been working because he had a shoulder injury. Yeah, I kid you not.

And he turned it into this big thing. He stopped going to work. He went to physical therapy. His shoulder was messed up, all this stuff. I had five passages in my car. None of us even had whiplash. The accent was so small. But I tell that story to say that nowadays, you hear stories like that all the time. I heard another story where a neighbor of mine, a close friend of mine's parent, was going to drop off a Christmas gift at her neighbor's house, slipped on her neighbor's sidewalk, and sued her neighbor. Come on.

Her neighbor, who she had known for a long period of time because she didn't put salt out. And so she was liable or whatever. And she won that case. I agree with your pushback. and i'm going to push back to your pushback now with a new point i wasn't even thinking of i should have been thinking about this out front you still need a lawyer on the other side of that case and that's technically you don't but i hear i hear what you're saying you're right you're gonna you're gonna maximize your value by having a correct 100 correct so at some point like if it goes to if it goes to court there needs to be someone

that's gonna be like in that case my client walked on top of the sidewalk it was not there was no salt it was a dangerous zone that's right

she can never work again her daughter cries at night you know and it's like okay dude like we get it and you know not calling out Mike Spear here

I was gonna say I think I know that voice I think I know it side note real quick the best was when he was interned like his dad really made him work like a dog which which was great great dad to have but he was interning i think when he was like a freshman and people would call up the office and he would be like he'd be at the front desk be like yeah spear spear and whatever it's called and um he would answer the phone and these people would be talking about like their latest injury or something and they would just hear like mike from the front desk be like no no hold on a minute

you mean to tell me you have lived at this house for 25 years and you only just noticed the crack of the foundation yesterday oh oh oh you only just started okay all right yeah I don't think there's a key you would call up and so then like some of the other lawyers are coming in and they're like um Mike that's a potential client so next time yeah yeah I was thinking you said that I was thinking like that's a lot of power to give a freshman yeah to be honest like it's I mean that's a lot trust but I mean I'm sure he knows the world i'm sure he's been studying under his dad for a while yeah yeah and not not talking shit on him at all i mean his case is that because he you

know he's a full-blown trial attorney sure he went right into it he's killing it but his cases that he's told me about are pretty absurd i mean they're like crazy shit so when i when i see that it makes me feel better about things. But I always do remember there are people out there just like you said, human nature. They're looking for, you know, the lawyer's got to get paid too. And so they're looking at cases. That's how you hear. Remember like the one we were growing up and we'd hear about the people suing Wawa for a pickle or not Wawa, McDonald's for like a pickle.

Or the coffee's too hot and it's like to me I I actually do like it when judges will I don't know what the terms are so I won't try to guess yeah like when judges admonish like have a penalty yeah yeah and then punish attorneys for taking cases and that is a little bit of a slippery slope sure certainly but like sometimes it's so obvious like you know it's like QAnon obvious it's like q anon obvious and it's like okay okay that's it that's yeah you shouldn't be doing that um it's hard it's hard and it's a hard thing and it's even harder when you try to go uh private right like and you have like a small thing because you almost you don't have to take every case but like you got bills to pay and if you're not taking

cases and you're super selective it's a dog-eat-dog world and it's an oversaturated field realistically. I heard a statistic the other day, and I didn't have a chance to fact check it, but it came from a credible source who said that they were looking at, I want to say it was a law school in Florida, and that the majority of students were coming out of this law school with over six figures in debt, and the average that they were making coming out was like 60 grand or something, or like 30. It was like nothing. Wait, now that's interesting. Let's take a sidebar on this. And we should fact check it and look it up. But actually, he did tell me where he got the article from, so I know it's real. I just don't remember the numbers.

When you're talking next, I'll pull that up so i'll check that but either way even if the numbers are a little off it wouldn't surprise me if there's a story there that is absolutely true i'll take it at face value that there are people coming out of law school where as you said they pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to go and they're making a lot less and they're sinking that's interesting though because the whole concept, like when I studied this for the first podcast when I was releasing like the solo ones, one of the data points that made me feel like one of the only ones

that I was like, okay, that's not the worst thing in the world with the college debt and the student loan debt was when I looked at some of the doctor and lawyer numbers and their numbers and their numbers were high but there was also a lot of data to support that a lot of them a lot of them not all of them were able to have much better means to pay that off because they were getting a serious serious degree right that said it's still the law of supply and demand with stuff and it's also like choice in your career sure go on your own do you go to the big do you sell out to the biggest firm that's me you know well no i'm saying like the

people that that just pick out like literally like the three names in in new york city and say i'm gonna go for that you know what i mean it's not that they're a sellout but you know what i hear you right so and that's the narrative for sure i mean i knew what i was getting myself into and and if you want we can we can get into how i made that decision. Because as you know, I wanted to be a public defender when I went to law school. And that's where I thought I was going to end up. And obviously, I didn't. So we can talk about that. But no, 100%, that's the narrative. I think that, you know, these people coming out, though, it's another question about education and about the, I don't know the word i'm thinking of here but like the the arbitrary barrier that we should have to it so like let's go back to college for a

second there were if i remember the numbers correctly i'm going to be in the ballpark if they're not 100 correct fact check me but there were around just beneath 20 million college students as of like 2017 2018 when i did that data last year and of that number i can't tell you what the optimal number of kids is that should be in college at a given time in this country maybe it's nine maybe it's 10 maybe it's 11 it's not for me to say it's not like draw this line right here sure but the data does support that an overwhelming number of those kids did not need to go to college because it's not going to help them whether it's their major or the competition of the major they choose and so now the reason I bring that in is because taking it up to like law and medicine

there is a high barrier of entry to get into these schools right but there's still a list of schools right so you went to a good school right some people go to a shitty school but the school charges them a significant amount of money not far off like what you're paying right to go to temple and stuff and so i look at that and i'm like should we have higher standards and i don't know if it's like the government running it or something like that never ends well but who's gonna do it right who's gonna say like never ends well, but who's going to do it? Who's going to say like, all right, below this, no one's going to a school because the school is going to suck and they're going to pay too much money and they're going to be sinking in debt. Right, right. It's a very interesting

thing to talk about and to think about. And when you think about the disparity in pay, it gets even more interesting. And the reason I say that is because- Yeah, what do you mean, disparity in pay? So, well, there's a bunch of disparities in pay, but what I was thinking about is that I actually read an article while I was at my firm that there are a few law firms out there that are paying students right out of law school, their very first year, $200,000 a year in salary. I believe that. And if you look at the opposite end of that spectrum,

I'm sure if you go to certain small counties in America and look at what their public defenders are making, it's probably, and again, I didn't look this up, but I would not be surprised if you're looking at 30 or $40,000. That's a huge disparity between those two and both. And you could have two people who go into law school and pay the same amount and go to the exact same law school. And one person has a perception where they want to be helping out communities and doing public

interest work, and they're getting paid terrible money to do it. And then you have this other student who's going to be ambitious and go to the top top uh law firm in their state or their city and they're making a a gross amount of money straight out of out of school and there's the one thing we have to remember is there are always going to be some winners and losers right always it's not like we can say let's let's like get everyone in circle everyone's gonna win's always going to be people that lose. Where I get concerned is when a lot of people are losing. Yeah, yeah. And I can tell, like, okay, statistically, not all of them are bad.

Not all of them don't have abilities. And, like, obviously the main example is with college debt. And I think that's because it's a lower form of education than, say, like law school. And it's also a bigger population and also a lot more choices of major that can fuck you up or make you. Right. Right. But the thing does still apply if I'm seeing numbers where it's like, well, you know, we had 3,000 graduates from University of whatever school in Florida this year. And 1,500 of them are going to be underwater for the next 10 years. That's an issue. It would be interesting, and I say this as a joke, but

it goes to your point. It would be interesting if we ran law schools the way that soccer teams are run, where if you don't get a certain amount of people that pass the bar, you get relegated, and you're no longer a law schooler. If your percentage of pass rate for people that pass the bar you get relegated and you're no longer a law school if you're if your percentage of of pass rate for people who pass the bar their first or second time and and you're under 50 you're out of here i am a thousand percent i can see where your logic is going i did not think of that that is great that But again, it would go to who regulates that, right? Who regulates that. But if you could create a set line, right? Then it's not, you're not putting as much faith in the regulator, so to speak. You're more putting the faith in, well, you either hit

that number or you don't. Which is kind of like, sometimes we lose that in society now. But I did pull up a source right there. This wasn't exactly what you were looking for. Some of this stuff, when it's really exact, it's hard to get in real time. But this article is supporting your point with other- Yeah, I actually think that might be it. Well, yeah. University of Miami. University of Miami is there, but there were schools outside of Florida too. Okay. And they were, the basis of it, I'm not going to read through all of it, but the basis of it is that people were leaving school in high percentages underwater.

But it's at six figures, you know, they're a six figure in debt if you go up a little higher and they're making you know 60 grand yep i mean it's it's unfortunate borrowed median of 163 000 and like the other thing people don't look at with this stuff and luckily i had my my finance background to like learn this stuff and really understand once i would see it paid out which is really how you learn it but like they you know even if it's a law school student who's 22 same difference to me like they put this paper in front of an 18 year old 17 year old going to college or a law student who's just looking to do their next thing and they go oh yeah you know don't don't worry about that six and a half compounding rate of return and it's like or rate of return compounding like on your debt right people don't think about

what that number does and then god forbid you fall behind it is it's a sinking it's a sinking ship 100 and then you've got the opposite in the spectrum and i've seen this in some of my close friends um of people who are just absolutely terrified of loans and they put themselves at a much a significantly worse financial position, because they're like, I'm not taking out any loans. And it's like they graduate and their loans are super low, but they have no savings account. They're not investing in anything. They've got no passive incomes. They've got nothing. You know what I mean? And that's a really scary place to be because you're one injury away from being completely bankrupt and having

nothing. That's terrifying. And that financial literacy component is something that I think we do as a society need to focus on because there is kind of a medium place to be and there is a large gap of information that a large majority of people probably don't have. I was lucky enough to kind of be taught some of these things at a very young age between my stepfather and my mother. They kind of really schooled me on the idea of like every paycheck you should be paying yourself first, right? And like having a savings account and taking on a healthy amount of loans and how you can use your loans and debt in order to increase your credit. So I didn't – I mean I'm no expert by any means.

That's awesome. But at a very young age, working at Rita's Water Ice for all the locals out there, I had those concepts instilled in me. Even every Christmas, my parents would take 50% of my money and put it into an account. And then when I got to be 18, all of that money was mine. And then I got to see it in real time. Like, wow, this is what it looks like to save. This is great. Look at this large pot of money that I now have for colleges that my parents basically showed me, hey, you could get this and much more. Let me teach you about investments. You're raising another amazing

point here. And it's, you know what? It's not something we've talked about a ton on this podcast. We've talked about it a couple of times, I think, but the lack of financial literacy in this country is astounding it is and i'll even call myself out when i left college and i went into finance i got financially literate because i sank myself into every is that right sank myself into i think sunk no i think i think you're right all right we'll go with it, I sank myself into all of the material there was. And I remember seeing stuff like things that should be very obvious to me, especially now looking at it like, how the fuck didn't I know that? But I'd look at it and be like, oh, what's that? You know, oh, that's how that works.

And it's amazing to me because I know I wasn't alone. And now I think of a lot of people because I take that for granted because I worked in it every day. Like I had to deal with people with their money and everything. And I think about everyone who doesn't have these basic questions answered and they don't teach it to you in school. Yeah, 100%. It's all really interesting. What you said brought up a point. And now I'm forgetting what I was going to say.

It had to do with financial literacy and kind of getting on board. But, yeah, I mean I was lucky enough to have parents that kind of prioritized it and and that's critical too because like my grandma was someone who was so good at it and i probably should have taken more from her but you know why why are some people great at it it's it's because of their experience or like their parents and stuff so like my grandma was a child of the great depression right she knows what it's like to have nothing right she knows what it's like to have to count where every penny is and so even though like over the years they made it and they did well you know she operates as if she is the poorest person on planet earth right right you know she's like good to

charity and stuff like that but then in her own life she's like I can't pot unless it's like her hair she can't spend on right right like that pasta cost three dollars and seven cents I'm like I don't fucking care just get the pasta but it's there is such a good baseline there and and I I guess I also probably took that for granted because a lot of people you know even their grandparents or their parents or like your situation with your your mom and your stepdad teaching you like a lot of people don't have that and we we really got to work it into schools yeah and i remember what i was going to say it had to do with taxes and so before going to law school i worked as a case manager for people who were struggling with opioid addiction and uh as a case

manager you're not making a lot of money so i didn't know you did that yeah yeah two years um in philadelphia i got to kind of like see city in a different light, and this was at the height of the opioid epidemic. I mean, not that we're not still in the height of the opioid epidemic. And so you're not getting paid a lot, and so taxes were whatever. I didn't really think about it too much. And now working my first big boy job and getting paid a decent amount of money. When I got my first paycheck, I kid you not, I called the accounting company and was like, I don't think that this is right. I'm missing money. I called my mentor and I was like,

I feel like I'm being shooken down or however you say that term. I feel like they're shaking me down right now. Where's the rest of my paycheck? I pulled out my offer letter. my offer letter here's the amount that you said you were gonna pay me here's the amount that you actually paid me where's the rest of my money and uh she broke it down she kind of laughed at me a little bit um and she's like she's like yeah taxes that's a real thing you you gotta take that into there's pennsylvania yeah there's the federal government there's bernie sanders yeah so i'm like oh that's how taxes work okay this whole conversation around it makes a lot more sense now um but i mean even that that's something that i should have known off the bat right that's something but i saw a number and i thought i was getting that number and so when i didn't get that

number i was like what the hell is going on here um and it's a story that i'll probably get laughed at for a while. I remember texting all of the other associates like, hey, did your check look a little funny? My check's looking a little funny. How's your check looking? Have you ever seen those TikToks of the dads who will pick up their kid after they get their first paycheck from their first job?

No. And they're like, open it up. And the kid's like, man, we're going. We're eating great tonight. And then he opens it up and the kid's like man we're going we're eating great tonight and then he opens it up and he's like what the fuck dad's like told you yeah yeah it's true like the one i always gamified it the one thing i would always look at is i'm like oh they're gonna give me money back at the end of the year right like oh like especially like if you're not rich like not killing it right in your job, you're going to get money back. So I'm like, all right, I'm up. I'm like, I'm up. I'm good.

But it is like it's another thing that you don't think about like the minimum wage, which is somehow still $7.25, which is crazy. But you don't think about how, okay, well, if that was technically only $6 because of the taxes or whatever it is, $6 over three hours, $18, $7.25 over three hours, $21.75. Add that up over a week. That's a couple meals right there for someone who's literally operating below the poverty line, which is a crazy thing. But I want to go back to that opioid thing. I did not – maybe I did and I forgot, which – Maybe not. If that's the case i'm

sorry but you've done so many different things i've done a lot i can i can run you down my track record just uh we're gonna go through all right we're gonna go through all of it today so uh so right so out of high school i knew and i wrote my my like college letter on how like i i really liked um helping people i liked you know being for others. I care about my community. I care. I recognize that I'm in a position. The reason why I am where I am today is because I come from a family that's full, and I have an understanding of the privilege that I came into with, right? And I talked about that on the podcast last time, and I'm very cognizant of that. And so I'm thinking, okay, what am I going to be when I grow up?

And I have no clue. You know, when you're 18, I literally could have done anything. And so my stepmom's a doctor, so I'm like, okay, she helps people. She seems to like her job. She makes good money. I want to be a doctor. So I went into school pre-med, and I quickly realized college biology and high school biology are not the same thing.

And so I switched from a bio major to biopsych with a, I really want to focus on public health, because this way I'm still looking at communities, I'm looking at problem solving, and that's where I wanted to go. So I actually did a program at Columbia University after I graduated for a summer, and I was there summer 16. It was a public health program. It was basically trying to make sure that minorities are starting to get into this field. Amazing program. Columbia was amazing. I'd never thought that I would like New York as a Philly guy myself. But I, you know, Harlem has a culture that's so unique. And I really did fall in love with Harlem. And then after I finished that, I still didn't necessarily know what I wanted to do.

So I'd actually did a year service through AmeriCorps. I work with the Notre Dame volunteers and I basically was working with adults with HIV and AIDS. And so just basically doing, making sure that, at that time I thought I wanted to potentially go into nutrition. That's what I wrote my paper on at Columbia and like food deserts, things like that, making sure that communities are eating healthy,

because as you know, I like to cook, like I love cooking. So I'm like, that's a perfect intersectionality. I get to cook, I get to try new recipes, I get to look at nutrition and make sure that communities can try to eat healthy on a budget, right? And that because I think that that's an extreme problem in America. And so I got to kind of test some of that stuff out at the Don Miller House is what it's called in Baltimore. And I got to make the meals for the residents, take them to their appointments, make sure that- AIDS and HIV. Yeah. Yep. And so these are adults who kind of live in this house. And I was just trying to,

I noticed, so I had actually volunteered there for four years in undergrad and i got along well with the director and she was like hey i'd love to hire you full time um or if you didn't want to you know commit to a full time you could do a year through americorps and then maybe do a full time afterwards so um i went there tried it out i i noticed that like during my four years i noticed that they kind of are very sedentary they kind of like have their own routine but they kind of stick to the house. Some of the residents definitely put on some weight over the four years. So I'm like, okay, what can we do? Let's try doing outside activities. Let's try doing excursions. Let's go to the zoo. Let's get outside. Let's get walking.

I actually gave them my parents' Wii. I was like, my younger brother's not playing the Wii. Let's play the Wii. They loved it. We were playing tennis, getting them active in creative ways, which was really fun. And so then I'm like- You're what, like 21, 22? At that age, yeah, 21. Yeah, that was right after college. And so I was like, okay, I could see myself doing public health, but I want to go back to Philly.

My end goal was always to be back in Philly. I'm really family oriented. So I was like, let me start looking for public health jobs in Philly. I ended up at Public Health Management Corporation, which is like, I think it's the largest nonprofit in Philadelphia. And they have a clinic called the Care Clinic on 12th and Callow Hill, which is a great service for low income individuals. And they had this thing called the Center of Excellence, which was brand new. It literally had started three months before I started, where this guy, Adam, had created this project, I guess, where he was going to try to get people who are addicted to opiates

connected to different services. And so we were basically, we were called community-based care managers or CBCMs, community-based care managers. And we basically were just making sure that we, at first, we were going out into the community because we were new, nobody knew about us. So we're going into the worst parts of Philadelphia, trying to like ask people, hey, are you looking to get clean? Are you looking to get connected to primary care? Do you have a doctor? Have you gone to a behavior health consultant and trying to bring them in? We were giving them tokens and just trying to figure it all out. And the most amazing thing, and I can

tell you a little bit more about this if you're interested, was how little people knew. I remember sitting in on Fridays, we would kind of have consultations with the whole team. So your doctors are there, your behavioral health consultants are there, your social workers are there, we're there, your case managers are there, the nutritionist is there. And they're like, okay, who has a patient that they think is kind of struggling? And how can we help those patients? Or who has a complex case? And so we were working with something called Suboxone. And we were doing what's called medicated assistant. And so we were working with something called Suboxone, and we were doing what's called medicated assistant treatment. So we were trying to

help people who wanted to be helped switch from, let's say, heroin onto Suboxone, which is still an opioid, but of a lesser degree. Oh, this is interesting. Yeah. Okay. So that's mainly what we were doing. Quickly, because I don't want to get lost on one point I wanted to ask about, which is when you're walking up to people to do this, what's your hit ratio? Like one out of 20? It's really low. And in the beginning, it was even lower because the one thing that I had learned is that people who are addicted to opiates and are used to an area don't like leaving that area. And as a naive 22-year-old, I'm thinking, like, you're telling me you want to get help. What's a bus ride? But for them, and I'm also thinking, oh, you're homeless, so why not just be homeless over here?

I don't think like that. And they shouldn't truthfully. I mean, I learned now, like, what we can what we perceive to be homelessness is not necessarily how they perceive it. You know, I mean, like, that is their home. That is where they like to be. That is where they're most familiar. And and there's nothing really wrong with that. But so it was probably less than one in 20. I mean, we would get people who would come in, try suboxone one time and never come back. And it was very hard in the very beginning to figure out how we can get patients to come in because 12th and Cal Hill is not, I mean, it's not a great neighborhood by any stretch of the means, but it's definitely not Kensington, right? And so, I mean, fast forward now, like they're, you know, plugged in with hospitals and we're getting referrals from all over the place. So we have a much bigger name. But when you're talking about the people you were going up to, though, who are addicted to opiates, is it pretty much largely heroin and then like maybe some Oxycontin? Yeah, yeah.

Possibly. So the people we're going up to are almost all heroin. I mean, we would get and that was the most fascinating part for me about this job was how the opioid epidemic reaches every aspect of American culture. I got people who are working two jobs who just got injured, hurt their wrists, started taking prescribed medication, really liked that feeling, really liked that and chased it all the way. I had people who have been addicted to heroin. I got people who have been on methadone clean on methadone for 20 years asking their methadone prescriber to bring them down on a lower dose and not having like success with it. So I mean, I got to see everything in those two

years. The suboxone that you do with them though, because it is still an opiate. Right. And I don't know much about it, but like when people are the most common way and correct me if i'm wrong here the most common way that people administer heroin is through a needle sure so when they come in to your center are they taking suboxone through a needle as well orally it's a pill it's a pill yeah okay and what are well what is suboxone used for like as it's meant to be used it's yeah it's basically to wean people off i mean oh that's it yeah yeah that's it's that is its purpose as i understand oh that's interesting so they literally created this as like a okay we're gonna take the temperature up to a five instead of a ten and then get people slowly off of it. Right, right. And that was the ideal. And it's not new Medicaid-assisted treatment.

Methadone has been around for decades. But the difference between methadone and suboxone and why people were really excited about suboxone was because methadone was something that you had to come, it was heavily regulated, and it was something that you had to come in every single day. And so you've got people who are trying to get clean and trying to turn their lives around,

trying to get a job and provide for their family, but they have to go into a, not a doctor's office, it's a clinic, but they have to go into a clinic every single day, which can be taxing. And for some people, it really works. They really like the regiment nature of it. Okay, I wake up, take the bus, get my methadone, go to work, da da da da da. But some people, it didn't. And those people are who we really

attracted because Suboxone you could get, and the way that we did it was, let's see, so we did dailies for a week, and then after the week, you got a week's worth. And then after a few weeks of doing one week's worth, you would get two weeks worth. And then you work yourself up to monthlies. So this way, you only have to come in once a month, you have all of your medication, right? And so it was also interesting to see both sides where it's like, okay, on one hand, you definitely have people who are out here who are getting their Suboxone, staying high on heroin and selling it because it has a high street value. And then you definitely have people who are um getting it

and um you know taking more than they're supposed to and and abusing it but there are also a lot of people and i had a lot of people who wait they can they can abuse it in the clinic so not in so you take it home i mean you just i mean you know once when you're on your dailies you take your daily and you go about your day when you're getting it for free um I think so yeah I think it's covered under they have to have insurance and it's good it's covered under insurance and so that's interesting that was a big part of our job was connecting them to insurance if you didn't have insurance we connect you to an insurance switch your primary care over if you don't already have one and and so it's a one-stop shop you go I mean homeless but

I'm sorry to interrupt a lot of homeless people don't have insurance correct and and this is another dumb question to follow that up, but Where the fuck are they getting their bills mailed to you know what I mean, right? Right? Yeah I mean they could get p.o. Boxes or They could I have it sent I think that some people had it sent to the clinic that stuff we mainly refer them to social work because it's a little bit More out of our hands But that was the nice thing about our clinic is that we had all of the resources that you could need, whether it be a nutritionist or whether it be a behavioral health consultant, or if you need a referral to

psychiatric care, we could get it for you. So the people who are really seeking out that change, and don't get me wrong, it's like any other addiction. You have people who do want to change and they fall off the horse and they get back on. I had patients who I wouldn't see for six months and then come back in. I mean, you see it all. And it's really fascinating because I got to do it at a time where it was highly talked about. And so I kind of got to see people saying stuff and I'm like, you have no clue what you're talking about. You're talking about these people as if they're animals or as if they're other but in reality they're they're

your aunt your uncle your cousin um your your mother your father your daughter um it was it was unbelievable one of the common tragic stories you hear is is the one you pointed out a few minutes ago where it's like someone had to get surgery on something and they gave them some kind of drug and then they liked it they liked it too much and they went on and on and on. A lot of construction workers. I'll bet. Yeah, a lot of construction workers. Yeah, people are working hard labor jobs where there's danger and they hurt their shoulder, they hurt their knee, stuff like that.

But what about the people who were straight up homeless as well, like long term? And I'm sure some of those people ended up that way as well. But the people who really didn't have anything, what was the most common link you saw to them starting to take the drug? Just literally like, I don't have anything to live for, so I think I'll try this. Or was it more nuanced? Yeah, I don't know what their motivation was. That's really what you're asking, right? Like what their motivation to get off of heroin? I mean, I think- No, no, no, to get on it. To get onto Suboxone? Nooxone no no no at the beginning like when they started oh oh oh to get on the

other types of cases i don't know that we ever really asked about how they started using drugs we we in our in our intake we would always ask how long you've been using drugs but i don't really remember asking what made them turn to drugs. And you know what? Not to criticize you guys, that's an oversight though. And I don't think it's a question that gets asked a lot, but we just kind of assume in low-income places or places of homelessness, urban areas, which are the most common place that what happens in other places, we just kind of assume, oh, that's what happens there. And I think that that's not fair.

Yeah. oh that's that's what happens there and i think that that's that's not fair yeah i think a lot of people i don't know if it's like just a struggle with purpose or i'm sure that's some of it or it's like you know a lot of people you you don't choose where you're born into you know what i mean and there there's no there's no hope and it's like all right you, you're 17, 18, 21, could be 25. And it's like, well, I think I'll fucking try that. Look, I can understand that. It's not, I would never want to do that. But I also didn't grow up like that. So who am I to say how I'd be thinking getting in my head?

You know what I mean? And I think a lot of the, to me, a lot of the quote-unquote, not the war on drugs, that thing's a fucking farce, but I mean like the whole battle back against drug addiction, I think sometimes we do lose a little bit of focus as to what motivating factors lead people to just try it rather than just the people who get looped into it for a tragic reason like they were taking a pill after surgery. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it is an oversight

um i'm i'm sure i've heard stories uh that are common in america where it's like oh yeah i was already doing this drug and it was kind of like a natural progression my friends had tried out and i loved it and i stuck with it um that was the one that i heard the most but yeah i mean i i'm sure that there are a lot of other stories and a lot of other situations that ended up you know pushing people in different directions now as they go on the suboxone though and this process starts to take place because it's a wean off truck yeah first question i assume there are different levels of magnitude of suboxone yes okay so you i guess the plan would be on whatever timeline it is for that

given patient that you guys decide right it's a certain wean off some whatever milligrams down whatever right right when they come to the end of that what was the success ratio and you don't have to give me exact numbers but like how solid was it that people really were better? And then also the second question would be, did you guys have systems in place that still sent people to get full rehab help as well? Yeah, yeah. Whatever help you could get, you wanted. We were like a client-centered service. So it's like – and this is something that I actually struggled with because my biggest thing was that in my head when I was coming into this field, I'm thinking the end goal is to get off of all medication. But the way that the clinic actually operated was that they'd never encourage patients to get off.

It was just whatever the patient wants. So if the patient wanted to stay on Suboxone, they would just stay on Suboxone. Now, was that in messaging rather than in the underlying goal you know what i mean no what do you mean okay that was a really fucked up way no no i'm i'm here so the whole point is that you don't want to you don't want to tell people what to do right and you don't want to shock them right and you don't want to be like hey just walk back here follow the little carrot and the stick right you want to you want to give them, you want to make them feel like they have the autonomy to make their own decisions. So what I'd be asking is that

in that case, are you saying, hey, technically, if a patient keeps asking for something, unless it gets to an extreme point, we will give it? Right. Versus behind the scenes, you're like, let's figure out how we can properly gain the trust of this individual and develop a relationship such that we can make them feel like, and it's also real, that they're making their own decision to wean off it. No, it's definitely the former. Okay. And I was hoping for the latter, right? Yeah. So, like, in my mind- That's interesting. In my mind, it would be the clinic's goal

to have patients be fully free from all drugs. But I believe the clinic's actual goal was to just provide the client with the services that they're looking for, whatever that may be. And so it was interesting. And there is a lot more to it, like a lot more complexity around these cases like if you say that you lost your medication um you know you could you could only get and this was regulated by the insurance company they would only do one refill like one early refill i think a year so like if you lose your medication twice and let's say you're on a month's dose and this does happen and some people they lie and some people truthfully lost their medication twice. If you have a monthly and you lose it the first time, we have to call an insurance company, get a medical override, get a doctor's visit, make sure the doctor's okay with it.

And then, you know, okay, fine, we'll give you the, okay, you lost your medication after being in for 10 days. Here's another 20 days to hold you to your next appointment. If you do that twice, the insurance company is like, nope, we're not paying for it. You know what? I'm the last guy to defend insurance companies. That's fair. Yeah. No, no, no. It is. It is. It is. And it sucks. It sucks for the people that are truthful about it, but it 100% makes sense because then you've got people who are just, oh, I lost it. I lost it. I lost it. I lost it. And they're making bank. And I saw it. I'm not just saying like, oh, this may happen. No,

I'm outside the clinic because across the street from our clinic, we had a partnership with a rehab center. And as anyone who's in this field knows, rehab centers are prime for drug sellers, people who sell drugs, drug dealers. I don't know why I couldn't think of that word. Those drug sellers. Meaning that they'll... So hold on a second. second yeah so like if you go to methadone clinics not even undercover they'll just go and be like hey you guys want some drugs basically right like that's the idea and and it it makes sense right you've got a bunch of people who are trying to get clean and you know that this is their vice yeah why not make some money there and so and so we would see it with our patients they come in hey I got Suboxone.

I literally heard the conversation personally with my ears of one of my clients who came in, and I came, oh, you forgot something. And I see them doing a handoff, money for drugs. People got to survive, man. A hundred percent. They have their own needs, i i completely got it and the one thing that i learned from my two years there was that there's no way i could cast judgment because so many people have so many different struggles and they have so many different needs you wouldn't believe the amount of parents that are in there and it breaks your heart who are bringing in their kids to these clinics so that they could get the stuff that they need to to to go on that's also amazing though and like

and like i i know obviously you don't want to get to that point and whatever but it goes to show you you know when people even if like they kind of have to because they got to drag them with them when people have their kids in there watching them get help or watching them have to do something that's like an interesting this is a huge motivator yes this isn't it's a huge motivator but it's also like man it puts some humanity on it 100 i'll tell you the saddest story that i had while i was there if that's yes please you don't have to ask if it's okay and so uh there was um it was a single father um and like it almost puts a tear to my eye even just thinking about this guy nicest guy you'll ever meet. He had a young daughter. She was,

let's say, around four years old. And he was a single father because he and the mother did drugs together, and she overdosed and passed away. So now he's trying to get clean for his daughter. He's already gone to trade school. I think he's maybe, get clean for his daughter he's uh he's already gone to trade school i think he's maybe um he works in renovating houses and he's like i you know i have my daughter um she i don't know if he no he was american his mother the mother was uh russian daughter speaks russian and and english and um at a young age and so um, he's like, showing me, nicest guy, every time he comes, oh, Terrence, oh, what's up? We're hitting it off. I just got a new gig. I'm going to be renovating this house over here. Shows me the pictures. I'm like, yo, this is dope. He's really

trying to get it together. And he introduced me to a huge gap in Philadelphia that I would have never thought about, what's never talked about, is that there are a lot of single mother homes for people who are homeless. So like if you're where like they'll take the mother and the child into the homeless shelters, there are almost no single father homes for homeless people, which I had never thought about and I had never known. And so it was very difficult for me to help him find, connect him with the right services to get a home, but we did it. And he was elated. Oh, Terrence, thank you so much. I really appreciate all the work that you've done. When I say the nicest guy, I couldn't say it enough times. And so we got him in, things are going well. He's bumped up to his monthly. I'm only seeing him once a month, quick visits. He never complained.

The first day that he came in, I remember most of these visits take a while because you have to see everybody before you can get your medication and get out. And we were really backed up that day. He was probably there. I think he probably got in around 10. He probably didn't leave until around the time I left, like 5 o'clock. I mean, he was there all day. And he saw me busting my ass, like running back and forth. Cause my job is basically

to like move things along to make sure that people aren't getting fallen through the cracks, everything like that. So I'm basically his advocate. So he never got frustrated with me. Hey man, I really appreciate what you're doing. Mind you, all of the people that come in that are trying, that are taking this seriously are going through withdrawal because you can't, that was another thing that I should have mentioned earlier. On the Suboxone. Correct. You can, if you have heroin in your system or methadone in your system, you can't take Suboxone because you'll go into what's called precipitated withdrawal.

So if you have heroin or methadone in your system and you take Suboxone, it forces your body into withdrawal. And it's a withdrawal that's worse than what regular withdrawal would already be. And you have to go to the hospital for it. I mean, you're puking, you're sweating, you're shaking. I mean, the whole nine. And I've had patients that I've got to see. Like, it's awful.

I want to come back. I want you to finish this story. I just want to let you know, I want to come back if we can. I never remember this shit, but I want to come back to the withdrawal thing. We can talk about it. So all the patients that come in, they have to have minor withdrawal because they can't have other drugs in their system to take the Suboxone. So mind you, he's in this clinic from 10 till 5 going through withdrawals, visibly sweating. And he's still like, Terrence, I really appreciate all the work that you're doing to me.

That's the type of guy this is. And so we get him fast forward. We get him into the clinic. He's on monthly. So he's only coming once a month. And then all of a sudden, one month, I didn't see him and i was like okay that's weird whatever maybe he went on vacation whatever um another month goes by i didn't see him so i i i think after three months i usually do like a follow-up call to all the numbers that we have so i called

the clinic and uh it turns out that he uh relapsed one time and overdoses and dies and now his daughter is an orphan and he doesn't have any family here because he was an immigrant correct oh my god she's got nobody and it's like did you look into that i i mean i i they can't give me any information on her so i like i have have no clue what happened with her. I'm assuming that the fact that they had that information, I'm assuming she went into, you know, Child Protective Services. But I mean, it's literally awful because you build a relationship with these clients, and it just goes to show and apparently this does happen. I say apparently, because I haven't looked up looked up anything online, but doctors say it all the time that a lot of times that first with, like, if you've gone a long time not taking heroin, because your threshold, what's that word?

Your tolerance is a lot lower because you haven't taken it in a while and you're on Suboxone. That first relapse a lot of times gets you heroin is such a sad and sick drug to me it is and we've all or i don't want to speak for everyone but most of us have known some people that for whatever reason sometimes it's like the saddest one where it's like literally as we've said like four times down where it's like after a surgery and then it just turns into that but a lot of us have known people who get addicted to that and i've known a bunch of people who've had that problem and i i did one of my friends who was on it for a long time and couldn't get off tried everything all right rehab the whole nine one of the things he explained to me is i was like do you ever like are you worried every day about going back to it and he said absolutely not every day really no really and i'll tell you why

and he said and this is more common like the narrative is a little different with heroin addicts than it should be he said i'm sure there are some people who have it differently but he said a lot of my friends died and then a lot of my friends who lived feel the same way he said the thing is i failed so many times getting off of it for years i don't know like three four years something like that because you have to get really far off it. You can't get clean for like three, four months and not worry about relapsing. He's like, there was this thing. I don't remember if he said it was like a year out or something like that,

but at some point, after thinking about it every day, as you just pointed to, you cross this threshold where enough time goes by where I guess chemically it wasn't in your system, where the thought of it sounds like the devil. That's interesting, yeah. You cross this threshold where enough time goes by where I guess chemically it wasn't in your system. Right. Where the thought of it sounds like the devil. That's interesting, yeah. Like, you get, like, when you think about it, it's not like, it's very easy for someone who is an alcoholic to think about alcohol and be like, oh, I'll sip some. Right.

Because they're not gonna, it's not the risk like when they take the first sip. Right. You know, it's a drawn out thing with heroin he's like that feeling is so distinct that when you're far enough past it and you act and you're one of the few who was able to do that you actually get a shiver down your spine he's like so i never never ever worry about it but most of the people i know never make it there because they die yeah and it's scary to me like i am very very ultra liberal on drugs and i am actually and this is going to sound very contradictory but i'm open to the conversation i'm not saying i'm there i'm saying i am open i'm open to all conversations but i'm open to the conversation

of full legalization of stuff okay what scares me about that is the cost on humanity because it will be, especially in the first decade, a pure survival of the fittest. If you make things so readily available for people, including people who are already abusing to get their score on the street because whatever happened in their life you're gonna have a lot of people die i don't care if you do it in controlled centers there's gonna be a lot of that stuff and yet i kind of wonder if a lot of the motivations behind the people

who get down these rabbit holes because it's not like they want to be there when they're there sure i mean that's crazy the idea that like oh i want to be an addict once they're an addict that's nuts no one wants to be that kid that guy didn't want to die right and leave his daughter behind he was doing everything everything every action literally everything right and he and he was good at his craft I mean I would see the before and after pictures of these houses that he would help to renovate and it's like I'm like you did that by yourself and he's like i did that by myself and he loved his daughter no question about it absolutely it's not like some people who don't understand this stuff are like oh such a selfish thing it's not like that man when you are chemically wired in a different way because of something even if you made the wrong decision at

one point in your life like you don't know what caused that and and i look at this and the cost of that scares the out of me yeah and there was a guy who went on, he was actually from Columbia too, who went on Joe Rogan, I don't know, like seven, eight months ago. And I am trying to get myself to listen to the episode, but I will admit I have not been able to. And I also haven't read his books yet, though I'm trying to get myself to do it. And it's this guy, Dr dr carl hart who no doubt is a brilliant guy he's a professor at columbia and his whole thing is he was like sober from what

i understand of his story he was sober for like all his life and then he he studies like chemical reactions and stuff like in the body so he's studying drugs sure and he felt like the narrative around like pretty much all these drugs is wrong, which, by the way, there may be some narratives in pretty much every drug that are somewhat wrong. Right. I'll agree with that. But long story short, this guy huffs heroin every day. Huffs heroin every day, and then writes books, and this is why I have trouble with the open mind, talking about, oh no, you can do that, it's okay. And I'm like'm like this is my fear if we get to that point where it's all readily available are we going to have intellectually brilliant people like this who decide to take a contrarian opinion and maybe he's okay by the way maybe he is are we going to have

those people though forget the fact that we are all wired differently and there are different strokes for different folks and then are you going to encourage, like, I can't get myself, I will at some point, but I can't get myself to listen to that because I'm like, I'm just going to get mad. Right. It's hard. And the other thing that there was conversation around during this time, and the conversation is kind of quieted down, is with the safe injection sites, where are you going to put them, right? And the idea, like, not in my backyard, I remember was like a common slogan. It's like, where are you

going to put them? Because if you try to put them out in a burbs or somewhere, it's like, that's not where a lot, where the vast majority, I'll say, of users are, and they're not going to go extremely out of their way, as I learned through the the care clinic to try to do something that they could already do where they're at. And if you try to put it in the neighborhoods where they are necessarily, then the property value of all of those homes and all the people, the hardworking Americans who live there, their property value is going to go down. And so it's like, where do we put these where it kind of makes sense and and where everyone is going to be happy is a question i have no answer for and that's unfortunately like the key question of all of it to even think of the idea itself i just have mike call lori in here who

is he co-founded the headstrong foundation which is an enormous enormous cancer foundation and he was telling the story where a guy who's a major donor and a cancer survivor literally for a dollar was going to sell them an entire floor to house cancer patients who are in town for treatment like literally like people fighting for their lives and the bottom line is the condo association wouldn't take it because it affects the property value right now talk about the milieu right of oh these low-income drug addicts right oh that's their choice that they did that that's a narrative that's a narrative and then people think about the value of their home to your point going down the value of their apartment going down and then it's like well do it somewhere else just not here what if they're saying that everywhere and then someone's got to take it

right and then someone's you know what and unfairly the people who accept that now like their financial value of their place is going to go down right right and is uh the other thing that i thought was interesting while working there was that all of the different types of people who work at at i'll say at our. I'm sure at most clinics, they have people from all walks of life. And most fascinating is that we also had what we called peer specialists, which are basically people who, you know, lived the life, turned it around, and now they're kind of want to be like a mentor to other people and to say, like, you know, I've been through this. You can do it too how can i help you um and and the peer specialists were amazing and we had this one peer specialist who was just an

old school puerto rican guy he'd been to prison uh you know and he did that whole story where like you know he's listening to louis farrakhan and and he's listening to you know malcolm x he's reading the books very well read knows that kind of stuff a bit of a contrarian you know like throwing throwing the ideas out there a guy listening to farrakhan he's out there and he's always pushing me oh terrence you're such a liberal why don't you what are you doing uh what do you know you know you young kid um hilarious we had the best conversations the best debates and things of that but he lived in the neighborhood he lived in um um why am i forgetting the name uh you know where like most of the most of the heroin was um not northern liberties but kensington yeah um he lived in kensington so like

he got to see it firsthand and he and his view on it was like he almost had that view where it's like you know i was there like he had no sympathy because he's like i did view where it's like, you know, I was there. Like he had no sympathy because he's like, I did it. And it's like for me, and I can't, on one hand, on my left hand, I say, you know, I'm not in that. So I can't really have a voice to it. I don't live in that neighborhood. I've never done that. But on the other hand, I say, you got to have some compassion because just because you did it doesn't mean that everyone can do it. Or not that everyone can do it, but everyone is at a place. And of course he knew that he knows that that not everyone's at a place where they're ready to get to to seek the help to get better or to stop doing drugs but from his point of view

he's like this is my home like don't do drugs on my on my don't piss in my rose bush don't that's interesting yeah yeah yeah and so yeah and so and and he's giving back i mean that guy uh uh he got he's he's one of the guys that got on bitcoin earlier talking about the episode with dylan he got on bitcoin early and he's mining he's trying to every morning he came into the clinic he's like yeah baby he's doing okay like literally every morning i mean he's back in in 2016. Yeah, this was 2016. So I started in the fall of 2016. He's not missing any meals. No. So yeah, he's doing well.

And he's super smart with his money. And like I said, very well read. He knows what he's talking about. But it was just interesting to hear him. And then compared to a lot of the social workers are people who go to social work school and they're – I won't say – well, I mean, they just have a different walk of life, right? Sure. They have a different walk of life. You need diversity though.

100%. And you need diversity in thought. It doesn't mean that the diversity in thought on an individual basis picking them out of a crowd is going to be the answer to go with. Right. is going to be the answer to go with right and actually he's right there a prime example of one of my favorite little sideway arguments on on stuff where i can't stand the the republican and democrat positions which is on uh i don't i'm gonna make up a term for it but like community responsibility so when you look at the inner cities the idea that would be opposite of what that guy raised was that oh none of these people can help themselves we got to do everything for them

right and we were on the opposite side of that spectrum at our clinic but right so you're all and I'm not even sure he was um you aren't though and I'll explain why the the implication is that all these people are incapable of doing anything right and that is the implication i feel when i when i hear democratic politicians talking to urban communities especially the republican stance is pull yourself up by the bootstraps i did it you can too that's also bullshit so one of my least favorite arguments is when i see republicans say well you've been voting democrat for 70 years. Might as well vote something else.

Right, right, right. What the fuck are you going to do for them? Right. You know, like the one thing – and it's sad. I got to say this. I say this very cynically. But the one thing that Democrats do is they take the time to pander to these people. Yeah, yeah.

You talked about that on that episode with that other guy. I've talked about this a couple times. And so this is another prime example because you have a guy there and what I'll give him credit for is he's a product of his own experience. And we are biased. I don't care what anyone says. I understand. Everyone is biased by their own experience. So he's like, I came from this area.

I had this problem. I got out of it. I'm fucking mining Bitcoin now. Why can't you? And I think it's a very good motivating factor. But when you then just assume that everyone can do that regardless And I think it's a very good motivating factor. But when you then just assume that everyone can do that, regardless of circumstances, it's a problem. Just again, the reason I bring that up is because I don't want the assumption to be the opposite as no one can do

it. We're going to do everything for you. I think that's our biggest problem with society. Those are what our two sides think. And that's why, you know, I'm pretty homeless here. Right. So I do want to clarify because I have a feeling I'm going to tell the know, I'm pretty homeless here. Right. So I do want to clarify, because I have a feeling I'm going to tell the guy who I'm talking about, about this episode, and he's the type of guy who will listen. I want to clarify that he's not the type of guy where he's like, pull yourself up by your bootstraps. I did it, you can too. He's more so of the guy that like, I'm not going to coddle you. And I'm not going to give you 100% of my sympathy, because I understand where you've been. But if you want this, you can go get it. And I'm an example of that. And so there is a kind of a nuance there.

But he was real cold with it. He's like, okay, yeah, you lost your job. Okay, suck it up. Let's go. What are we doing next? And he kind of had that approach, which worked really well for a lot. I mean, a lot of the people who came in and used him as a peer specialist loved him because that goes over well for some people and doesn't for others right so he's also like a coach cheerleader oh yeah you know what i mean like like it's like when someone's having a really bad time the people who are able to psychologically acknowledge would be like yeah you know what this sucks but we're good yeah like yeah we're gonna be good yeah there's like a thing like all right this guy's crazy but i don't know why i'm listening to him you know what i mean yeah yeah yeah he's great i mean he was one of my favorite people at

the clinic and you may just thinking about puts a smile on my face well that's awesome yeah and that's that's cool like your experiences are so interesting to me because you like and i said this the first time you were ever in here and i'll say this the day i die like you have walked the talk your entire life like you've been enacted like everyone puts activists in their bio they're all full of 99 percent of them are full of you've been an active, like everyone puts activists in their bio. They're all full of shit. 99% of them are full of shit. You've been an activist since you were 12 years old. Yeah.

Like literally since I knew you at 11 or 12 years old. And you've been in all these organizations. You were involved with NAACP when you were growing up. And then in college, like the Freddie Gray stuff because you were down in Baltimore. And then you do all these other things. Like this one I'm just really learning about for the first time today but like you also you've worked in criminal justice reform because you've worked like you've gone into prisons yes and work with people and this is another one that i'm really

curious about because it is a topic i'm passionate about and i try not to rub people the wrong way because i understand that there are people out there who you know they had horrible crimes committed against them or family members and like they're hardliners on stuff and i understand that but i try to like everything as i say i try to live 30 000 feet up in the air and yeah and i look at criminal justice as a very archaic untried and untrue system in our country and what I'm not saying is that if someone's a fucking serial killer, you know, don't throw them in jail. I'm not one of those guys. I'm saying that we have a department of corrections that doesn't look to correct.

Yeah, 100%. Part of the podcast that I was listening to to and an idea that's not new, everyone knows it, but that baffles me, truly baffles me, and there's not much out there that does, is how we can live in a society that loves statistics in the way that it does. If you watch any major league sport, you can learn any statistic going back to the 70s. And yet, when you look at criminal justice reform, and you look at all of the statistics around whether this system that we've created is actually working, there's nothing out there. There's no centralized database to learn, oh, how many times have there been police shootings? You know, there's no criminal database to say how many times have police been killed in the line of

duty this month versus this month or this year versus this year. And it's truly unbelievable given how much we like statistics as a society. Yes. Agreed. So, I agree with you. I mean, I think at the end of the day, there does – I think you would have to be living under a rock to think that our current system is working the way that it is intending to be worked, right? I think you would have to be living under a rock to think that our current system is working the way that it is intending to be worked, right? I think you would have to be living under a rock to truly believe that people who go to prison are suddenly reformed and never commit a crime again a day in their life. And the thing that I always push people to think about is why? Why is that? Why are we okay with sending people to prison to supposedly make our

neighborhood safe when it's not really working? And how can we change that? And I'm thinking about that. I think about that almost every day. How can we change it? A major oversight of mine, and when I say oversight, I mean something I've never really sat down and poured through the data on. Like I couldn't pull any out of my ass right now. I'm sure maybe at some point I came across a number, but I couldn't think of it. And that is the private prison system. So how much about that are you aware? I don't want to put you on the spot.

I know a little bit. I know a little bit. I don't know an incredible amount, but I know a little bit. So let's just stick with the idea then. Sure. bit so let's just stick with the idea then sure to me the concept of like this is this is a prime example of where capitalism goes way too far right so i'll argue with anyone that capitalism is the best system it is i'm still very critical of it because i'd like to improve it to be the best it can be i understand it's never going to be perfect but i think there's things we can fix and here's a prime example when you put an incentive on human beings to lock up other human beings when they also don't have to be

there physically every day while it happens even if they are but let's say that they're not because they're not these are companies that operate from behind the scenes and do their thing that's sick to me and And so, I don't know what the percentages of are where money's pouring into private prisons and stuff, but you read some of these cases about some of these judges who righteously so have gone to jail for a very long time because you find a trail where they were incentivized to send people, oh, you know what, I'll give them 20 instead of 10. And I know you're going in one direction but i i just want to loop it back because this is something that i actually do know is that when i was working in um as as a case manager you start to see it with the pharmaceutical companies

yeah and this is not something that a lot of people are talking about and i've fallen out of touch so i don't know how it's progressed i I'm in. I'm in. Let's go. While I was there, you would hear cases. There would be rumblings. Again, I don't have any statistics to back this up. But there were rumblings that there were pharmaceutical companies that were, if a judge had a patient or had someone who was addicted to drugs, and they would say, and this part I know is true, they would say, hey, you need to go clean yourself up go to the care clinic for example and um and and try out drug treatment generally but there was talks that that general was going to start being specific where pharmaceutical companies will say hey judge why don't you put this on and this is a conspiracy i want to be clear i'm not saying this is factual but the conspiracy was that either we are going towards or that we were already there where these pharmaceutical companies will go to judges and say, hey, you should put them on Suboxone, try Suboxone specifically.

And the judges would say, okay, you need to go and try Suboxone. And now the judges are getting kicked back. It's interesting. Even as a thought, it's interesting because it's something that you can and i can tell by your face you can believe yes i don't know whether it's true or not but it's something that absolutely could be true given the history of our country now see this one's sick this one's sick it is i'm gonna relate it to one that everyone's talking about right now and that's the whole vaccine thing there's an enormous difference here the vaccine were one of the things that pisses me off is there's so much misinformation about it right now and its efficacy yes is the idea of a vaccine to completely stop you from

noticing you have any symptoms because it's in your body and you don't and therefore you don't know it yes would i love that the vaccine would i love it if the vaccine were working a little better against variants for that at this point and you didn't know you had the fucking flu when you had it and it's covid yes however if you look at the numbers of people who are in hospitals and i'm not going to pull them up right now you guys can fucking pull them up on duck duck go google do your thing. Right. It is the majority, majority on vaccinated individuals, right? And of the vaccinated, some of the numbers I've seen, though I am far less confident on this, so please take this with a grain of salt, a lot of them are like very out of shape individuals, right? So they're just going to the hospital as a precaution more than anything. But the numbers in like where there's been breakouts among vaccinated people have been really good like people are feeling banked up but they're staying at home they don't

have to go to the hospital they're fine so to me the vaccine's working yes but it's a part of that whole narrative they're like oh it's not working right you know control control and again i agree with some of the control stuff not the not the concept of the bags but the control stuff right but i see this and one of the things that people talk about is like big pharma all the time like oh these people they're drugging all of us they're trying to corrupt us and stuff like that what i've said about the vaccine is that if these people are lining their pockets and giving us a booster shot instead of something that they know they can give us once and we're good right i don't give a no i don't care okay

i don't care if you care about businesses and a lot of the people who are anti-vaxxers are also pro-business at least in in my circles the people that i've heard of if you're for the businesses go out and get it because the statistics say that it's working and if it's working businesses do well if businesses do well you should be happy now that's an interesting point but i'm gonna stay off the side i'm gonna stay off the sidebar here please i'm saying'm saying, if those people, if, you know, a year from now, five years from now, they send a bunch of these people to trial because they were robbing us and like, you know, double jointing us. If they weren't killing me, I'm just not

going to send a leniency letter to the judge. Lock them up, you know, do your thing. I just don't, it doesn't affect my life. Yeah. And especially since it's not like we're paying thousands of dollars for the vaccine anyway correct i got mine for free i don't know it's free like for me if other people are lying in their pockets they gotta look themselves in the mirror at night that's for them like i'm not here to save the fucking world in every single place like there's certain things i want to live without right like information but when you're talking about something like what you brought up where it involves chemically hooking people to things or marketing a drug that that the hope is that oh maybe we'll get a percentage of them that just never go off and that's sick yeah it is

that's sick because this is not something where it's like a vaccine and you don't even notice it after the first day you did it and like now you're good just not getting this fucking weird disease or whatever it is virus now it's like oh this is something that is going to be a daily part of your life and it's going to chemically change you and affect your relationships and your quality of life and that's fucked up and and another reason i why i don't put it past quote unquote big pharma is because you see it in other ways right and so while i was working well i'll say there was a period of time where pharmaceutical companies would approach doctors and would say, hey, you guys want to go out to dinner? I'll pay for your dinner and I'll teach you about this medication. And they market it as an educational thing where, hey, we're teaching these doctors

about a new drug. But what it could be, I won't say that it is because the optimist in me wants to believe that these pharmaceutical companies truly do want to educate about a medicine that they're passionate about. But if you want it to be a skeptic, you could say that what they're really doing is buying these fancy dinners because I've been to them and you're paying and you're eating at the best places and you're like, hey, I've got this medication, use this over what you're already prescribing and that's only one step next to doing the same thing with judges that is what that is exactly what it is so it's i mean it's absolutely crazy and i i kind of like i said i looped us back i know we were going no no no let's

stay with this okay i i like going all over the place especially like when guests are coming up and riding a wave i'm like let's ride the damn wave so we'll come back to criminal justice reform because this is interesting but when like one of the things that i always at least give credit for on like an individual basis in the situation is that it's often a product of groupthink right you get a few bad actors in there. There's some bad people in there, right? Sure, sure. And those are the people that then just happen to, like, kind of drive the train in one direction.

And other people then, you know, we use terms, and I use them too, and I still will. Like, big pharma, you know. Right, right. Fuck the banks. You know, I hate banks and everything. I work there. But, like, I work there, right?

Right, right. And obviously, like, I'm out'm out here like for the people right so it goes to show you there's a lot of people in these places who are very good at their jobs and do their thing and are in their lane because these are big companies and i'll tell you i'll never forget when i was in between industries like i was looking to shift this is pre-pandemic and you know because i guess because the pandemic happened this happened so it all worked out but i was looking at a lot of things in marketing and there's one lady i got hooked up with who is awesome like the sweetest woman incredibly sharp unbelievably good at her job and she was a major major league head honcho in marketing at one of the big pharma companies

and so i went into their studio which is like a whole floor and all these things and visited with her for a day and i will tell you especially given the fact that there are regulations on these ads that you create and stuff right i was blown away with the work i was blown away and she was so she's an artist right right she's an artist who was hired by a big pharma company because they were paying and like, okay, well, I guess we're doing a good thing. We're giving people something they need. Right. So she's told, you know, she's biased.

She's told about a drug and she's like, this must be amazing. All right, let's message it this way. And her eyes are lighting up showing me all these ads of drugs she's made that are incredible, by the way. I mean, like I'm watching these, I'm riveted by the work that she put together. And then I remember, like, doing some research on some of those drugs and, like, some of the things that happen to people. And all I could think about is I'm like, I know I just met with a really good person today who's also extremely talented and great at her job. I know that she doesn't know any of this or she doesn't think of any of this because she's like, I work at a good place. I like the people I work with.

We must be doing good things here. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. But also, I know that some people there, not all the drugs, maybe not even at this place. Maybe they're actually mostly okay despite some of the stuff I read. Some people aren't going to look at the world with rose-colored glasses that she does.

And they're going to take advantage of her being in that seat with that talent. And they're going to do this to people. And to me, that's the ultimate sadness here because we then blame them all. And it's like, well, shit, man. Same thing with bankers in 2008. I've said it like 12 times on this podcast. It's one of my favorite quotes of all time. But this great trader

at lehman brothers because obviously traders had nothing to do with what happened right jared dillian had a famous quote in his book fire writer by the way read his books he's incredible but he had a famous quote in his book after the crisis that he wrote which was working at lehman brothers there were approximately 20 000 people who worked there and 19 995 of them were good people who were very good at their jobs i always amend it and say it was like 19 970 either way the point remains and it's like it's no different with this and then even like where you bring up the legal system all it takes is like a couple yeah a couple bad judges yeah you know and police yes right i was i was waiting for you to go there and i wasn't thinking of that but i mean uh and for those who know me know that my father was a

police officer and and and while i do believe that there needs to be some radical changes within the police department i do believe i know a lot of cops my family is made up of a lot of state troopers, police officers, FBI agents. And I do believe that there are a large, I'll even go so far as to say majority of cops who go in because they care about their community and they want to do better. But the issue is that the ones that don't are really bad. And the difference between cops and all of these other fields are that, well, maybe not big pharma because some of these drugs could kill people. But the big difference is that with these police officers, the ones that are really bad who want to do harm can do generational harm, right? Generational harm where we're missing an entire generation of fathers now who are in

prison over extremely minor drugs who are or are having things planted in the worst case scenario you've got overzealous cops who are planning things um and and it's terrible but what you made what you said earlier made me think of this book uh that i had to read for my 11th grade satire class with ann rock who's in satire class yeah i took a i took we had electives almost like a because like my school's a college preparatory school so um we had electives chestnut hill guy don't forget don't forget chestnut hill academy which is now springside chestnut hill academy which is a conversation for another day but um but uh ann rock she took uh she taught satire one of my favorite classes one of my

favorite professors super hard i don't even think i did well in her class, but she's just so good. I was soaking everything in. And one of the books we had to read was Thank You for Smoking, which ended up becoming a movie. Yes, that was a movie. Very good movie, by the way. Yeah, I didn't see the movie, but I did read most of the book. I don't think I ever really read it. I was the other way around.

But you could probably tell it more because I barely remember. This was so long ago but it was about a guy who was in the advertisement company for smoking and i don't think he i don't think he did smoke at that time and he knew how bad smoking was but he was at least how i'm remembering correct me if i'm wrong if you remember differently i think the famous line from the end that summed it up not the spoiler alert here aaron eckhart was phenomenal in that movie but it was something along the lines of he was in court talking about it and somebody asked him if your son talk about personal responsibility if your son came up to you today he's 13 years old and said dad i want my first pack of marbles what would you do he said i know i failed as a father and i go out and buy him for

him and the concept was it's on people to decide what they want to do so it's not our fault but i i just i really remember that and i'm glad you you bring up that book slash movie so please continue but it's it's such a there's a lot of moral questions and yeah and it's similar to it's a similar theme to what i was just talking about it is and that's why it made me think of that because the way that i remembered it was that he that he didn't smoke personally but he was at an advertisement company and he was like saying, you know, smoking is great. You should do it. It makes you cool, whatever he was saying. And then eventually, like, I remember him getting kidnapped and people putting like nicotine patches on him.

I don't know if they did that in the movie, but I definitely remember that from the book. And it was about like kind of like almost like his trauma. And then he could kind of see the other side about the horrible effects. Maybe I misremembered. No, I think that's what – I haven't seen a movie in a long – I'm going to watch that now. We're going to have to revisit. I haven't seen that in over a decade. Regardless, I implore people to read because the point that I'm trying to make holds true regardless, and that's that there are these moral dilemmas sometimes in what we do. And I will tie this back to what I was

thinking about saying, but since you said I can talk about whatever, I'll go into it. In that I've always done social justice things. I've always cared about my community and put my community first. And I thought that that would lead me into becoming a public defender. But ultimately, I'm ending up at big law, I accepted an opportunity at a large law firm. And I actually remember having a conversation with my peers at my at the clinic that I was working for. And they were like, Yeah, okay, you're going to law school, but don't become like a big law guy, don't don't change up on us. And while I have no intentions of changing who I am as a person, and I have every intention of intention of keeping my moral compass intact and letting the law firm

know, because for me, my morals are more important than a few dollars. And by a few dollars, I mean hundreds of thousands of dollars, right? For me, my morals are more important. There are going to be situations that I have to think about that on a daily basis. There are clients that I'm going to have to take where I have to think about, do I really want to be representing someone that did something that's potentially extremely heinous, right? And so that's something, that's a thought that I had to go over and over and over and over. And what I came to the realization that was about the other side. And the other side is that there are so few African Americans in big law. At my firm specifically, there are, we have over 200 lawyers that work there, and there are five, I think, five black ones.

One who's partner. Only one who's partner. And she said she's, before she was partner there was one partner and that partner has since left and she's been the only partner there for a very long time and and when i tell you that the firm that i work for is very progressive and was the reason why i picked this firm because they care about diversity equity inclusion very much so um they taught the talk they walked the walk and if you only have one partner. They only have one. And that's, I mean, that's a lot.

Because if you look at most other places, they have zero. And this firm, I believe, was like one of, if not the first firm to hire a female partner in the city of Philadelphia. So, I mean, what's considered progressive to the law field is exactly the reaction that I get from everyone else that's like, what? That's progressive. It's all relative. Yeah, it's super relative. And so I intentionally picked this place, and I do have other ideas of my own about what I plan to do while I get in there that I won't share publicly. But I say that to say that you have to think about these things.

You have to think about the morals of the situations that you're getting yourself into. And the thing that I've really kept coming back to is, if not me, it's someone else. If I'm not representing this person, it's someone else. And hopefully, God willing, I make it to a place where I can be a decision maker, then I get to a place where I can say, hey, I'm not taking this case. I'm not doing this. Man, this is such an interesting dilemma to me, I'm not a lawyer. I never wanted to be one. My dad was one and I knew I didn't want to be one when I was like 13. So I think about this a lot. And the most common place to think about it, though, it is applicable everywhere, especially

like in high stakes situations that involve money. But the most common place is like when you think about criminal defenders and stuff. And the idea of the law is that everyone has a right to an attorney which makes our law incredible so that means even the worst people Charles Manson even though he didn't really use it I think he represented himself but he he had a right to an attorney right you know and again the slippery slope implication of that is brilliant because that's why even a guy like that, technically, yes, and you've got to think that if you're that heinous, the majority of the time the law is going to work itself out. And obviously, that doesn't always happen. We'll get to that. Sure.

I look at this and I think about some of the lawyers I know in criminal law, and I don't know a ton of them. Most of the lawyers I know, and I know a lot of lawyers, they're all on the litigation side. They're all on commercial. They're on civil stuff. They could be employment, stuff like that. But I do know some in criminal. And there's one guy I know. I want to be careful how I say this, though I would like to get him on the podcast.

So fuck it. We'll just go the whole way. But there's one guy I know a little bit. My dad, he grew up, he was in my town and my dad and mom were friends with him and his wife and great guy, this guy, Brian McMonagle. He is legitimately one of the top five defense attorneys in the United States of America. So he was number one, I think in 2015. so right now actually going to go against my example here but he represents meek mill okay in that whole case okay so finally representing what i view as a very innocent guy like a very fucked up case yeah yeah i say that

because this man has never represented an innocent person he'll deny this as he should but an innocent person ever in fact this is the guy who got bill cosby off and then quit and then bill cosby got found guilty until that recent whatever sketch or whatever sure but the way he got him off was also like fucking crazy just unbelievable like that's what you get paid the big bucks that's what i'm saying i say all this because and people will cynically tell me i'm full of when i say this but this guy is morally one of the greatest people you will ever meet in your life like he is the salt of the earth somebody who if there's an afterlife he's he's up one way ticket like an amazing individual and i i on the beach a couple

summers ago I ran into him and I talked with him like a little bit about this but one time I really want to dig into him about it where he can't you know I can't talk about clients obviously but he can talk on a general level you know what's that like when you you know what guys you know he's guilty like some bad shit too and you still gotta go in there and you have to make his case now admittedly i i'm sure maybe at some point he did something but i've never seen him represent a serial killer but he's done murder trials he's done you know he did the cosby one he's done some

crazy ones and like i'll speak for myself here cosby was guilty as you know that's that's a wild thing to me because it it can take a good person or a bad person to do it it can take a bad person it's just like oh there's a lot of money in this and i'm fucking great at it i don't care what it does to other people i'll go do it right and it can also take a good person which i am 1000 convinced he is which is yes obviously i've turned into the best of this so i get paid the big bucks and I take the best cases but I'm doing this because this is what our legal system is and so everyone has a right to this and therefore I am going to go in and do my job and that's what you have to convince yourself of at the end of the day I mean I I interviewed for the Philadelphia public defenders and I actually

did a clinic with them um last spring and you know they ask you questions like that is there like a type of case where you think that you couldn't do? And I don't know necessarily why they asked that on the spot. But you have to convince yourself if you're thinking about going into that work, whether private defenders, private criminal defenders, or public criminal defenders, is that you have to convince yourself that we have a system. And if you're someone like me, who cares about the community, and goes into it, because you want to try to help the community, you have to believe that there are so many people who have been screwed over by the system, that it's only right

to make sure that everyone has the opportunity, regardless of whether they did the crime or not, because that's the way the system is set up. and you have to believe in that system. There's really no other way to think about it. Every single person should be given that opportunity. Private defenders may be a little bit more difficult to kind of wrap your head around. For me, it was very easy because I'm like, you know, poor people are taken advantage of all the time. So I will represent anybody who can't afford to pay for an attorney. But you have to believe in the system.

I mean, because there's otherwise I don't know how you would sleep at night knowing that you potentially got someone who raped a child off and they're out there and could be doing it again. That's the thing, man. That's a scary thought. And I don't know if he did any of those. I haven't seen that one. Maybe he did. I don't know if he did any of those. I haven't seen that one. Maybe he did. I don't know. But I don't know. And I don't know that I've ever really had that conversation with a defense attorney at all.

Like how you sleep with that. Because these guys do know. I did talk with one guy once who's not a defense attorney, but he was early in his career for a few years. And the thing about his cases was because i was asking about guys who were guilty he he argued them and he did them correctly but he's like they were obvious outcomes right and it wasn't like some wealthy guy paying a ton of money it was like this guy was a murderer like that's how it's gonna go right okay whatever and so he never really had to worry about that but what about the guys you know the ben brafmans of the world or

something you know what if what if somebody had gotten off harvey weinstein right like how and now and i believe and i respect her for this but i believe it was like a woman representing him if he got off and he wasn't gonna but let's say he she got him off how does she go home knowing that like even if some of these girls came out of the woodwork you know this guy you know this i mean it's just to even bring it into the to the realism what actually happened if you look at that guy brock that swimmer you know yeah man i mean he got the lightest sentence possible what was what was the what was the word the judge used on that i don't even remember was that the one where he said like affluenza or something no that was a different one but that that was like a car accident i believe

this was this was the stanford swimmer brock turner yes brock turner yeah and so like if you look at that i mean i don't know it's hard i mean it's a really difficult thing that you have to struggle with and and and i'll even bring up just for the sake of bringing it up so that I can sleep at night is that the same is true for the prosecution, right? So, I believe statistically it is more likely the opposite way where it's like you're representing a guilty person they get off free because our system is supposed to be set up where we would rather have, you know, a hundred guilty people go off than send an innocent person to prison. But that doesn't mean that innocent, and my father's the perfect example because he works

with those types of cases, doesn't mean that innocent people aren't sent to prison every day. You know what I mean? In the nation. I won't say in every city, but in a nation, I'm sure every day there is an innocent person that goes to prison and we have to think about that. And in my opinion, that's way more egregious in the way the system's set up. It be way more egregious and so it's my number one fear and so as a prosecutor you've got let's say you got a guy or a girl who you're not 100 convinced did this crime but it's your job to put them away regardless what do you do another one of my favorite topics you're bringing up gamification i was waiting for gamification of the legal system this we've talked about this we've talked about before i don't know

that i've talked about this with a lawyer though so this is this is interesting it's funny if you google gamification or yeah gamification prosecution i think is what you said or prosecutorial gamification or something like that nothing comes up so why don't you yeah because that's a term i thought of in my head because it makes sense yeah and i knew what you meant when you said it but i was just like let me just look up some articles there's nothing out there so i think the terms they would use and i could be wrong about this but maybe things like moral hazard or ethical obligation versus something or you know what i mean but i know exactly what i throw that word on there and like i'm sorry but an example we use all the time because i i just think it should have disqualified her from the ticket is kamala harris her record as a prosecutor

i'm not going to sit here and say she's a horrible person maybe she is maybe she isn't what i do know is that she was a no i don't want to use the word victim she she was a part of what i see far too much of in the prosecution system which is a result and so with her the egregious people give her shit about the truant mother's thing because of the way she talked about it that was pretty egregious but like the thing i look at more is what who was the guy the josh dubin who runs the innocent project he talked a lot about this she suppressed evidence for people who were on death row when the evidence was clearly going to show that they were innocent the reason she did that i am guessing here i't know this, but I am guessing is because that would be a bad look on the numbers and on the reputation of the prosecution department.

And this is where you fucking lose me. Because it's like, and don't get me wrong, the fact that we had Biden and Harris running against Trump is embarrassing because literally like a bare minimum was automatically going to be better at that point especially by the end and yet we picked a guy who's just old as fuck and her who's just brutal it's like i know our country is a lot better among women than hillary clinton and kamala harris and i don't know why they've been the two in focus but that's just my own issue right there but i look at this and i go i'll plead the fifth on that one that's fine when you start to go and and actually to your credit like you weren't hot about that either in the last episode so and you're on record with that and that's that's great because i i don't think anyone should have been hot about the last election but

you look at her record and when you go to that level even if it's gamification you are disqualified in my eyes because you are now you're not just if it's gamification, you are disqualified in my eyes. Because you are now, you're not just, like, it's already time you're fucking with people. Like, when a judge gets a little gastric reflux and comes back from lunch in a pissed off mood and says 15 years instead of 10, he goes home that night. Right. Well, he just gave that guy five extra years to get caught up in the legals. Like nothing. Like nothing.

Like nothing. And I'll pause you there just because that was like the thing that really ate at me at my time with the public defense. I was only there for a semester and I only did preliminary hearings. But what I saw was a microcosm of what I know to be true in the justice system and it's so subjective. And it really kills me as an analytical thinker the way that you're taught to be in law school, why we can be okay with such a subjective way at criminalizing people and potentially ruining

families. It was really disheartening for me to go in front of a judge and make an argument about a case, a low-level drug offense. Okay, this guy's got conspiracy and possession with intent to deliver, which is extremely common in philadelphia and i go up and i make an argument and i cite case law and i say this is not criminal conspiracy this is not possession with intent and he's like i don't believe you we're gonna let it go to trial and the next day i get a different judge and i i argued the exact when i say the exact same i literally copy and paste the word document for the next criminal conspiracy, possession with intent. It's a little earlier in the morning.

They already had their breakfast. It's nice to see you, Terrence Jones. What do you got for me today? Give the same argument. And they're like, oh, yeah, this makes sense. We'll throw out the conspiracy. We'll have the possession with intent. What?

It's the same. I literally the fact patterns couldn't be any closer. But because the judge, because it's four o'clock in the evening, rather than 10 o'clock in the morning, you want to give them a different sentence because it's a different judge. It's unbelievable how subjective this can be when we're playing around with people's lives. Yes. Did you read the book Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell? I am currently reading the book

no shit yeah and and it was funny because you mentioned malcolm gladwell in another podcast and i i i do not read for pleasure generally uh and i i have no problem saying that um but malcolm gladwell is the exception to that rule um i did read outliers cover to cover which is i think one of like five books that I've ever read cover to cover. And my fiance's mother bought me Talking to Strangers, an assigned copy by Malcolm Gladwell, which is amazing. He's a brilliant writer. He's amazing. Because he brings out all different perspectives.

And I think he's even, like I think he's a like i think he's a i think he's a liberal guy i don't want to speak for him but he legitimately in his books like they're not there's no element of of in my opinion there's no element of politics to them everyone should appreciate them because statistics it's statistics it's not just it's not even just statistics though he puts humanity behind those statistics and that's what i and he's an amazing writer but i guess if you didn't know what i was going to bring up maybe you haven't gotten to this part in the book but it's i think it's only a few pages so small spoiler but there was a study done in i believe one of the new york city courts i think it was maybe the

southern district one of them and it was on judges and bail numbers and their bias on how they would hand out these bail numbers based on someone's background meaning their race and so what this ai study determined is that judges were far more likely to give a higher bail number or a higher burden of bail or whatever you want to say to people of minority backgrounds than people who didn't have minority backgrounds. And what Malcolm's takeaway, and I haven't read the book in a year, so I want to make sure I have this right, so fact check me if you need to on this. But his takeaway wasn't that, oh, these judges are all racist. He goes, there are some built-in ideas based on previous experiences you have in previous cases. And also the fact that maybe sometimes someone looks different than you, that you don't think about it. And you say, you know what? $100,000

instead of 50, same thing with sentences. And so I kind of like the approach of, hey, yeah, are some of these judges probably bad? Yeah, some of them are. But a lot of them are probably great. And there's just a way that, unfortunately, our humanity is still built into the system. It doesn't matter how much education you had or how great a judge you are understanding the law. There are still certain flaws that we have as humans that we may not consciously realize that affect people's lives. And it's still scary because you see it happening on a real-time basis in you know in this case in the year 2017 or whatever it was and yet i'd like to get that out of the system i hope you can understand though that i sometimes have some doubts about

that because i'm like well shit if we're not there now like how much longer is it going to take us yeah i mean i i just i i think about utopias all the time and I think about what, what could happen in a perfect world. And, uh, thank you. And, um, it's just like, I don't understand how we can live in this world where I, as a law student who only did one semester at the public defenders can see cases that are so similar and yet there isn't a similar outcome. And i know that's what you mean by that so like what i was talking about where it's like okay it's uh uh you've you've set up a uh investigation and you've got a lookout person the cops are looking out they they you

know do the same thing i mean the cops do the same thing every time and they lock the guy up and then it's always uh conspiracy possession with an intent to deliver um and it's always the same thing and yet the the the sentencing can be so different or the uh the charging can be so different you would think in a world where we force lawyers to go through three years of law school and then have them study uh every field of law that you can think of, just to take a test, closed book, which, let me be clear, would be malpractice if you did that in real life. If you came to me as a lawyer and said, I know you do labor law. Can you help me with this problem? And I said, Closed book. Right. And I said, oh, yeah, I'll help you with that problem. Go do this. And I know this to be

true off the top of my head. I'm not going to do any research. And you go out and do it and get sued. That's malpractice. And yet that's what we're testing our lawyers to be. It makes no sense. But I say that to say, in a world where we make lawyers go through all of those hoops, how can we not make judges go through those same hoops? And I don't know for a fact that they don't but how can we have it such that it's not like oh when you see this scenario happen you should be looking for these things and in looking for these things the outcome should be this and then we look okay this judge he's known for being harsh he's known for being a harsh judge he's his 15 years of being a judge, typically we suggest judges to do this. He's doing 10 times that.

You can't be a judge anymore. Get out of your seat. Because you're going way past what we would recommend someone to do for that type of scenario. There's not that many crimes out there. Right? And so when you're committing these crimes... What do you mean there's not that many crimes? I mean, like, okay, let's say, you like burglary theft you know like different like for criminal purposes

there's not that there's a set number of crime like there's it's not like we're every day we're inventing new crimes i understand you got i mean it's a set it's a set world all the crimes codes out there there's not going to be a new type of crime let's call this uh uh sock burglary and that's going to have its own scent no like burglary is burglary is burglary it's not going anywhere so my thing is i don't understand how we can't have a set rules and regulations for judge to judges to adhere to so that when you have a scenario when it's burglary and we kind of do you know the crimes code has a suggestion you know 10 to 15 years. But within that 10 to 15 years, what is it? What are judge, how does a judge, if you have a case, let's say murder is

20 years to life, let's say, and a judge says 80 years, how did he get there? That part, I don't understand. If it's 10 to 15 years for a crime, what makes it 10 years? What makes it 15 years? Is a judge literally just pulling it out of his ass i don't get it this is one thing that actually works both ways too which is interesting because truthfully the stories i hear much more of and the statistics would back that it works in the wrong direction far too often where people judges give cases what's it an adjudication sure is that what they call it at sentencing i know a little bit of my law a little bit they give i would hope so they give the whole sentencing thing and and they give far too long or you know like we were saying

earlier i think like you know they had five years on just arbitrarily but i i did see a case i think i've talked about on the podcast before but i saw a case earlier this year because once in a while i will go down certain rabbit holes and one of the rabbit holes that probably happens once a year is i'll look at cases on youtube of sentencings just to see like the humanity of it just like someone's getting sentenced to life in prison like what's that like holy shit it's like tragedy but it's also like wow they did some fucked up things sure and i was watching one earlier this year where a father was testifying at the sentencing of the kid who killed his son and the story of the kid who killed him was he was like a basketball star in high school but he wasn't good enough to let go of the next level

and so he had nothing he had a broken home he lived in a up place with a bunch of people who did drugs and you know his life had fallen apart and so one night he went to rob a pizza delivery guy, and it went wrong, and he killed him. And the pizza delivery guy was this father's son. And so the guy gets on the stand at sentencing, and obviously he was found guilty, and it was a capital murder case. And what happened next was one of the most amazing things I've ever seen. The dad gets up there and he says, nothing is going to bring my son, and I'm paraphrasing, nothing is going to bring my son back.

But what about this kid? He's 21, 22. He never had a shot. My son had a good home. You know, we were there. We supported him. He had a good life. He was happy.

I wish like hell he was still here, but he's not. And this kid was only in that position because he came from a bad home. His life went wrong. He was with the wrong people. And he made a really, really bad decision that's going to hurt me for the rest of my life. But why should it end his? Right. And the judge had to excuse herself from the courtroom because she was in tears.

And I think she gave the kid 20 or 25 years. Now, obviously, you know, 21-year-old, his life's ruined. Sure. Right? Like, to an extent. But. It could have been way worse. There's a light at the end of the tunnel.

Right. And what was amazing was after that happened, the thing that made the judge cry, I should have said this first, was that the father got off the stand and went and hugged the guy and i don't care who you are i don't care what law books you read what systems you believe in if you could not see the fact that that kid's life was changed right there i can't fucking help you yeah yeah and and and so this brings up uh uh something that i was hoping that we would get into, because I think one thing that you do very well in the show is try to look for the nuance in situations. And typically, when I recommend this podcast to other people, I recommend it to people

who are looking for nuanced conversations, which I would hope would be all of America. I think that you have to look at every situation from, or attempt, you have to attempt to look at every situation from both sides because I don't believe the world is black and white. I don't believe you can live in black and white. And I think a perfect example of that is a show that I'm watching right now for the first time,

and I'd be surprised if you haven't already watched it, and that's The Sopranos. You'd be surprised if I haven't already watched it, and that's The Sopranos. You'd be surprised. Bro, I've watched those 86 episodes probably 37 times apiece. Yeah, that's called par for the course. I'm not surprised at all, and I'm more surprised that I'm just now getting around to it. Yeah, I can't believe that. That was an oversight on my part.

I'm sorry. Yeah, no, no, you're good. I let you down. It's been recommended to me, don't get me wrong. I've just never really gotten around to it, and i've never really put stock into it and i'm um almost done season three and i can very much so i just finished the pine barrens episode oh that's what sydney and i watched last night and i can see why everyone loves it yeah but there's one thing about the sopranos that i don't think people

are thinking about and and when we talk about nuance of crime i think about the sopranos because everyone loves tony soprano i mean they love him as as an actor uh what's his name james candelfini yes rest in peace um James was incredible. Unreal. It was truly, it's truly amazing to watch history happen in front of you, as I am now for the first time. But what's interesting is that as I, a black American, watch this in 2021, first off, I'm shocked at how relevant it still is today and how current it is. I mean, it's so far advanced for its time when it came out. But two, I'm thinking, I can now see why people used to call the Italians the blacks of the whites, right?

There's so much similarity over these stories where he grew up without a father. How many times do you hear about that in the black community? He grew up and he had nowhere else to go. He had no area where he fit in. And so he went into a life of crime and he owned that. And as Americans, we watch this story and we fall in love with this character because what The Sopranos does so well is it looks at the nuances of these situations. It looks at this is the life that he chose, and these are the situations that are put in front of him. And he has to make decisions based off of this code. It's not too far off from the stories that we hear about the black community, but it's portrayed in a light with a white person that's so very different. And it's something that

as a black male in 2021, and constantly looking at like, wow, like, this is incredible that so many people identify themselves in this story, or so many people can see why he's making the decisions that he's making that lead him down this life of crime, but they can't necessarily do that in reality um and and in reality where the person is has a has a darker skin complexion it's it's fascinating to me great great show now what was the because we can go off on that all day you just walked into the greatest show of all time yeah yeah by the way i have held off i am now this has never happened before i am four years deep without having watched it. Which means I'm going to, the longer I go. Now you're going to watch. No, no, I'm still holding off. I don't have time right now.

But the longer I go, the better it's going to be when I do it again. Oh, 100%. And you know, the reason why I started it now was because they're coming out with a prequel. Yes. I believe in October. Many things are new. And so I want to try to finish it before then so that I could get in on the action.

My question was, though, what was the context you were bringing this up? I heard your final point on the nuance of it. But are you, because we were talking about the judicial system before. So are you saying, I'm just trying to relate it back. He's nuanced, is what I i'm saying is that he recognized the nuance in that situation he lost his son which is arguably the worst thing that could happen to a person as that's what you said the the guy had his son killed yeah in court he lost his son which is arguably the worst thing that could happen to an adult is to lose their child and rather than going

into grief and to saying lock him up put him away for the rest of his life which is as americans we're almost trained to do too often we're quick to say he ruined my life let's ruin his and eye for an eye is often what we're taught rather than going down that route he looked at the nuance in that situation and said he grew up in a completely different situation and he empathized with what happened now it would be interesting it would be interesting to see if this case happened 20 years ago and his 20 years are up and what his perspective is now as he got out free because what i'm also most interested in is those statistics you know does 20 years make a different

from life you know Because at the end of the day, taxpayers, we're paying for that. If he lives to be 100, he's 20 years old. He does 20 years, he gets out at 40. If he does 100 years, we're paying for those extra 60 years that he's alive and in prison. I'm interested in those statistics. And is 20 years enough? Is 20 years the equivalency of life? And if so, that takes a burden off the taxpayer's dollars. All right, we're on a complicated cyclone right now because of what you did, which I like. So I want to keep the cyclone going. And now I'm going to pull it back to your Sopranos example.

Because now I understood what you were saying when you were saying it first. I was just then connecting. I was trying to connect them back. And now my mind can kind of. I like i like that it makes us think so now i understand exactly what the parallel was there and so to go back to tony soprano for a second people who watch that show 99.99999 of them don't know what it's like to be a mobster and would never be one and myself included you know right so you know there's some guys in north jersey i could say other things about but that's neither here nor there but you know they're watching that show and yet even though he's

this guy living in this forbidden world that's really from the 20th century and now we're going into the 21st you identify with him and you identify with him because the way david chase built that show is he didn't want to make this about a mobster he wanted to make it about a guy going through a midlife crisis who has psychological issues and just happens to be in the context of the plot line a fucking psychotic criminal mobster right and so what he did is he took things that the average 45 50 year old male who hates themselves and maybe doesn't like their wife anymore in this country thinks which is a sad thing to say and also women as well towards men let's keep it equal here it's like dead ass serious

these people who are like well i'm thinking that shit too they see this battle and what ends up happening is they start rooting for tony soprano which i did too and i continue to do so because you love him as a character sure he's a scumbag of a human being like he's a horrible person sure but you recognize that like well number one there were things that pushed him to get there which you still have to take a responsibility for yourself but there are things that push them to get there. And there are things he struggles with that show humanity in him that no matter where we are or who we are or what we do or how criminal or uncriminal we are, non-criminal we are, we can relate to that. Right. And so when you're talking about like the nuance of it, David Chase, and it's why I hope to God The Many Saints of Newark is a great movie. Because like you don't i know

over the second coating of the mona lisa i know right and i think many saints is going to be great that trailer looks awesome but i hope it is but david chase had had a perfect game he he he portrayed a masterpiece that was built off of his own experiences growing up in north jersey and understanding these people i mean i lived up there right i drove by 13 aspen all the time right like i was in these neighborhoods and that's like the nice one that's where he lived but i was in these places i know the places where they shot in the film i lived right by the george washington sleptier house that's right so he nailed it like he fucking nailed it and yet in the middle of nailing like the setting and everything he nailed the guy who appealed to everyone around the country and in other countries

because they were feeling human things right so now to bring it all the way back around to the courtroom example listen dude i don't who am i to say fuck you to somebody who's like lock them up for life who just had their kid killed I'm not going to be that guy however not to say that all the decisions to lock someone up for life in that situation are wrong a lot of them are probably right

I don't know but I'm also going to be the guy to say that's why you're not a part of the solving of the problem here because you are emotionally biased or nothing wrong with that same reason why when you have a hostage situation you don't have the fucking parents of the kid play hostage negotiator right right so those people are perfectly fine to feel that way which makes it all the more amazing that

that father had the empathy that he did and i love i was pointing at you when you brought up that word because it should come up more on this show i try to bring it up but you know it goes where it goes and i guess it doesn't come up enough but the lack of empathy in this society for beliefs is absurd and you can relate this to all things and and it's hard. I don't want to dismiss the lack of empathy as if it's something that's so easy, because especially now, and I can imagine it's going to only get worse as technology blossoms, it's very hard to have empathy when you live in a bubble or you live in a small circle where you only see one thing. I can't expect someone from suburbia, myself included, I didn't grow up in, I mean, I grew up in the city of Philadelphia, I grew up in Roxborough, though, which is like on the outskirts, so I'm not going to pretend like I'm this hard gangster

or anything like that, but I can see a world that exists why it's hard for people to fully understand shows like The Wire, right? Which is very similar. Great show. Everyone, you know, most people have it as a top tier show. But people don't typically get into the mindset of a character like Stringer Bell in the same way that they do with Tony Soprano. And part of that is because Tony Soprano's a main character. The show's built around him.

You get to see every aspect of his life. Stringer Bell, he's not necessarily a main character. You don't get to see every aspect of his life. But that being said, it's also just, they're completely different. And it's a lot, I can imagine that it would be a lot harder for someone who's never experienced this to associate themselves

or see themselves within tony soprano than they would with with stringer bell it's a great point i never contrasted those two either i i mean i have because uh the time that i'm watching it being a black individual i like as soon as i watch and i'm like okay right now i see why it's one and two now i see why the top tier shows because they do a good job of showing the nuances of these situations it's incredible the wire i i've talked about that on this show three or four times before i will die on that hill that is one of the greatest things i've ever seen it's so good and i watched it in baltimore oh my god you got because you were down there that's right i was there but dude that is something that should be required watching for everyone because there are actors in it but it is

a fucking documentary it's it's it's so good and and the wire is i can't i haven't finished soprano so i can't speak on it entirely but the way that the wire sets it up in the different stages how each season kind of has a theme and being in baltimore and seeing it happen it's just like like you said it's like a documentary it's it's spot on there are two scenes in there i mean there's a lot more in two scenes but there's two on this subject matter that are famous scenes in there that stand out that i think speak to so many different things and before i say them i will say this i i watched that show towards the beginning of my freshman year of college and i watched it i watched at the senior my senior year bro i watched it in like four weeks i mean i was like every free

moment i'm like this is unbelievable yeah and i called up my dad who's like my dad is like how would i describe him he's a regular just republican guy who's just kind of he lives in his world a little bit like like in a in a beautiful way by the way which is easy to do if you know this neighborhood sure sure actually because we're not in an urban environment where you're getting all these things i mean this house is beautiful right and it's and it's in a location where it's very easy to only connect social like like via uh technology what's funny though is is my dad grew up in a completely biracial town so he has that like when it comes to like social, I don't know how I want to say this. He kind of, I don't know the words I'm looking for because I'm going to say them wrong.

Don't get me kicked out of this house. No, no, no, no, no. When it comes to social issues, he was just always so supportive of them that I think in his mind he's like well everyone should just always be supportive of that like even and and like i say this now just because people lump in like being a conservative like trump and all that right nuance it's like kind of an an assumption to him like you should just everyone's the same right do your thing like his friends were all white and black and it's like that's what the fuck you know what i mean yeah so he has like a very beautiful kind of almost like rose-colored glasses view of things and so what's interesting is i remember pointing

that show out to him and he's like it's about what and i'm like the drug trade in baltimore it's crazy he's like why why do you think i would want to watch that i'm like it's just good and i'm telling you dude i think he got through the first three seasons also in like three weeks and he was like i can't believe shit is like this and it's amazing what a like technically a fictional technically right a fictional tv show can do to show you that a place that's by the way like 75 minutes from here right has a six block radius that's beautiful and then i mean just a city that's in tatters because it's a systemized thing it's something that's going on over and over and over again and so i say that because even like people who could never think of that stuff based

on where they're from or whatever when you expose yourself to experiences like that you understand like you are forced to understand that like okay even if we don't live in iraq and we don't there is nuance even in this country there are even situations that we got to look at and say well why is that and what does that have to do with systems that we have passively condoned or condoned you know and it doesn't make everyone a bad person it means like all right well how can we fix that you know, and it doesn't make everyone a bad person. It means like, all right, well, how can we fix that? You know, this is America and like, not for nothing. You see those devastating videos out of Afghanistan and, you know, the chaos at the airport. Right.

And you see these people holding on to moving airplanes. Right. holding on to moving airplanes right just to get the fuck out of the country to try to get to america on a moving jet that they have no chance of staying on once it gets up to a certain air pressure because falling off that jet and dying is going to be better than staying where they're at yeah and they know that they know it's not like let's not pretend that these are are dumb individuals they fully understand the situation at at hand um but that my point is they don't know like we just because that's true doesn't mean that still here we may have the best system we can't look to improve it in places where we fall behind that's what i'm

trying to say and that's the biggest point it's it's the biggest point that you can say and the reason why i say that is because so often and this is i will admit definitely an old school train of thought and i would hope that by the time our children have children this train of thought is completely gone hope so patriotism doesn't mean that you have to be absolutist we don't have to pretend that if you don't, if you say a bad thing about your country, you don't love your country. In my opinion, patriotism is trying to improve. And the only way we can improve is if we look at our worst things, whatever you think the worst thing about America is, looking at that thing and coming up coming up with a way to improve that

thing yes because as the saying goes which is 100 true you're only as strong as your weakest link whatever that weakest link is you have to pay attention into it pour resources into it and fix it because as long as that weak link exists it brings our whole nation down that's gonna be a tiktok that's the first time i ever said that but that was so fucking brilliant i'm just gonna play it off of you i'm gonna let that one run that was you said it all i'm here to do is is to emphasize it because you're 100 right that's that's that's true patriotism and and it's super hard for me to understand anything else.

When I go now, I just came back from the Finger Lakes up in upstate New York. I know the Finger Lakes is not. I said it as if it's a thing. How is that? It's very interesting. And I'll say why. Interesting is a funny word. It's very interesting.

As a black American, it's very interesting as a black american it's very interesting so right so i was up where like i think 40 minutes north of of syracuse up in a small town called skinny atlas not too far from cornell university um and when we when i got in it was like 9 30 at night right and so it when i and the reason i bring this up was because when I came in, I'm seeing Trump this, Trump that. And in my head, I'm like, Trump, he lost. You know what I mean? And maybe I'm too young to remember. Maybe after Obama lost, people were still having Obama.

I don't remember it. I won't discredit if people say, oh, I saw Obama flags. My thing is, Trump's not our- Obama never lost. There would have never been a McCain flag. I'm going to correct it for you. What I'm trying to say is that I don't remember still seeing Obama flags. Bumper stickers is a different sign.

But when Trump was in presidency, I don't remember people still having Obama flags. And maybe they did. But my point is that it's not like's not like american like we have this not weeks i don't have these flags but americans have these flags these confederate flags these trump flags of people or or institutions that are no longer necessarily relevant for the current times which i find very interesting can i cut you off for one second so and and this is maybe like the fourth time I've had to say this in an episode one place where I will just draw the line so hard is the Confederate flag I agree with free speech

do what you want to do and that applies to everything so like if someone wants to put a I'm not even going to say some stuff put ideas and be whatever but whatever like there's it's such a Bad idea. I will laugh at them and most Sane-minded people will too like flat earthers, right? Yeah, exactly exactly Same category, but probably a little more evil But like I just will never understand people flying around a Confederate flag I just for the life of me It is like the most

Even if you're not a bad person and you're just a fucking moron and there's another word i'm looking for that we're not allowed to say anymore but that's what you are like even if that's the case why like what like what is like i always ask myself history bro what is the upside history what is the upside is there any upside to what i'm doing right now is there any upside there's no upside right you know what i mean so like and i say that because i understand what you're saying about the trump flag and stuff too but i i also don't even want to take away from the seriousness of that and draw a false equivalency and be like all right well someone who just really liked the last president

is upset they lost is the same as someone who's flying the confederate flag. But why? But why? Why do we like presidents so much? That's a weird question. That's a fair question, bro. For me, that's weird. Like, I loved Obama. It was great to see the first black president. That is a piece of history, truthfully, a positive piece of history for this country.

I'm not going to have Obama flags in my house. I don't have any Obama things hanging up in my house i don't have any obama uh things hanging up in my window if you have a bumper sticker that you bought back then and you want to keep it around because it's history fine same thing with trump if you have a trump bumper sticker fine but putting a flag up when like his time is over is something that i can't wrap my head around you know what i think it is it's a combination of two things number one he technically has another term of eligibility true so people don't think he's dead that's true i think he's dead but let's kind of hope that's that chapter's behind us but i mean anyway if they re if they bring it back out when he runs again i'd be fine with that okay but i'm saying

like in the meantime they're making the case sure Sure, sure. And that's the right to do it. Like, hey, you're still popular. Come back around. We want you. I can see that. I also think that Trump was a hurricane. He was a far different thing because he drove a lot of people into his arms who, even in 2016 or 2017, after he won, if you would have asked them then, are you ever going to like this guy? They'd say, get the fuck out of here. He drove people into his arms not because he's this great guy.

He's one of the most flawed people you've ever seen on the public stage. Sure. He drove people into his arms because the other side got so intolerable in the constant berating of every single thing he did. And I will raise this point by saying that to this day, I find myself a couple times a month in a conversation. It hasn't happened a hell of a lot on this podcast, but I will find myself in a conversation where i have to defend him i i don't want to talk about him like i don't want to talk honestly like i'm not a huge fan of biden although it hasn't been as bad as i thought it was going to be like it's been okay right like i don't want to talk about people who i'm not a fan of but when people like it's never enough to go 150 right they have to go 600 and it's like then people will be like he did this this and i'll be

like well wait no no he didn't right hold on hold on a minute right and i didn't polar he's polarized that's what i'm saying he's polarized i could do that about obama because i was a fan of obama's first term right i was not a fan of his second term right but i and that and that's why i was i was a trump guy in 2016 which i figured out I'm like, I didn't know that at the time, but I was more repelled, not even by Obama. I'll give him credit. Obama is actually on record being like an open dialogue guy. Right. You know, it was more like the people behind him and his party who went the other way and they repelled me.

And so I'm like, this guy is a savior. Right. Right. And so that ended up being wrong. But the idea of what repelled me, i think i was still kind of right about and i remember like looking at his presidency and like i didn't feel like i had to defend him a ton you know what i mean like i felt like it was pretty straightforward and now it's so hard the other way that the reason i say all this is because these people who are wearing the flags it's a defiant thing right because they've been told by the elites you're less than you're nothing you're

whatever you don't know shit and these are the same people who got ignored for years and it's not by the way it's not just a racial thing too though i think that is that is certainly an aspect here because let's be honest a lot of them are kind of middle america or upstate america white people i always look at the signs we missed in i mean it was before this but in 2011 because have you ever read dr stephen pinker no from harvard i'm gonna send you like i'm gonna send you yeah please do it's it's incredible he writes he writes data backed okay about how humanity has continually progressed so in a way he constantly reminds us that hey i know we're complaining about all these things right now right but look

where it was 20 years ago look at how everything from sustenance around the world to you know supply of water to basic availability to live not just in this country i'm talking like the most unfortunately poor places in the world how we've improved one of the things that he identified that really changed my life though was the data behind the wealth gap and what he found and the graph it's inarguable it's a fact this is not an opinion it's a fact since the 1980s and the graph, it's inarguable. It's a fact. This is not an opinion. It's a fact. Since the 1980s, and the graph that he used, the primary one, was from 1988, though you can draw it sooner or later than then as well. The wealth gap, if people are listening and not watching right now, I'm making a V.

It went like that. Okay. in 2008-2009 when the whole economy crashed everything went to shit but the people who were able to come out of that ahead not event not right away but eventually were the people who already had a lot of means to money right so it increased the wealth gap tremendously and by the way i've said this before some people like to hit obama for that i'll defend obama forever on that because he inherited that there was nothing he could do i know he put all bankers in his cabinet i know that wasn't a great look but like who the unfortunately who the fuck else was going to fix that and they didn't fix it but who the fuck else was like going to make it somewhat okay right right so logically logically

and statistically he did what he didn't fix and and it started far longer than before he was in there, is the fact that it kept going in that V. Right. And so in 2011, you saw two movements form. You saw the Tea Party and you saw Occupy Wall Street. The Tea Party was these quote-unquote country bumpkin, middle-age or older-age individuals who had been left behind by automation and the government occupy wall street was these urban liberals who were coming out of college with all this debt and they were young and pissed off and had been left behind by the system their ideas on solutions were opposite mostly not all of it but a lot of it was opposite their problems were the same and what they didn't

realize is that they had much more in common than they did differently. And they drew it along lines like race and on geography and things like that. And then what happened was in 2016, the two people who probably should have been the two final candidates, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, who were opposites, came out and spoke to the same problems to the same people and they just divided them. That's interesting. And so I look at this and I see that you talk about the Trump flags and the reason I bring this up is because I wonder if it'd be the same with Sanders and to an extent on a smaller scale it is sometimes. These people didn't see Sanders and Trump as like the candidate for president. Right. They saw them as the savior who saw the world the way they did and actually spoke – whether or not they walked the talk with what they said, and I can make the argument that both of them in certain ways haven't. They saw the world the way those people did and they saw them.

Right. They didn't say – they didn't look this way while the people were looking at them from over here and saying, can you hear me? They actually heard them and they spoke to those problems. Right. And so i get it like the tribal nature of trump is that and you saw it with sanders in 2016 when he got fucked over you saw people who didn't come out and vote for hillary right and they had to this day have the sanders sliding those people didn't view bernie sanders and donald trump as like the president

they viewed them as the god right but i still hold by my statement, Bernie or Trump, that it's weird. Oh, it is. No, no. For me, it's weird. And the reason why it's weird is because it's like you're basically putting the president on a pedestal, which we do. And I understand that we do that, but I think it's very problematic because we make the president out to be something that it's not supposed to be. We blame all of our problems on the president, and I say it only

because hopefully one day we'll have a female president, right? And so, we blame all of our problems on the president. We also like to glorify the president, but realistically, it's just a position. And the sooner that we as America come to the realization of that, the sooner we can try to move on because this whole idea of it is weird. And something else that you said to me that kind of resonated with me was about kind of like their intent. And Dylan kind of talked about that in his episode with you about- Not for nothing, that was one of the best things I've ever heard.

What? What he said. Yeah, about intent. That two minutes is two of the best minutes on this podcast. So, I didn't actually get to it. I just heard the clip. But intent versus impact is something like if you're really into like social justice and things like that is a conversation that often comes up or maybe it's not social justice,

maybe it has to do with my like Jesuit education. But intent versus impact was something that we talked about a lot. And you think about it can be oversimplified, and I almost feel like Dylan almost oversimplified the issue because there is something to be said about the impact that you have on another person where it rivals the intent that you had. I understand where he was coming from, where he was saying that the intent is extremely important and often gets left out. And I get that. And I do implore individuals who are impacted in a certain way to think about other people's intent, because we're not perfect. And oftentimes, we expect other people to say things or portray things. And we talked about this about podcasts, about people saying things or portraying things in a certain way and not looking at what they intended to mean by it. I do think what Dylan said was correct, that we have to understand where people are coming from with their intent. But that's not to say that the sayer, in this case, the Trump flag holder,

there's something to say about how that impacts other people. And if you are the type of person where you're not a confederate, you're not a racist, you just truthfully believe that Trump is a guy who saw you for who you were and you hold him close to your heart, that's great. There's no way as me as a person who sees that Trump flag and feels unsafe because I know oftentimes that Trump flag is associated with that confederate flag, which ultimately leads to you being a racist, makes me feel uncomfortable to the point where i feel like i shouldn't even be here anymore so where i would push back very quickly to be careful and i'll hedge for you is that when we say it's it's often associated with a confederate flag or often associated with being a racist that's probably a little bit unfair okay now stereotypically stereotypically i'm with you do i see like let's paint the most actually do i see it on the back of pickup trucks two of them right yes and and and and i won't i actually won't say stereotypically i will speak from my personal perspective and say

that the people that i know personally who are putting that on the back of pickup trucks because i did go to all white institutions my entire life and i wasn't in the all-white institution during trump uh trump's coming into presidency the people that i know are those types of people and i shouldn't and i should not have over generalized and i and i will and i appreciate you for pointing that out i shouldn't say that this is the case mostly in america i will say that is mostly the case in my life so thank you that's a fair anecdotal experience though because and like as long as we say that you know no and i appreciate you that that that can happen i mean i i had ashton larrow on here and we got into like an hour-long conversation about cops now on this show i've

been a little bit hard on cops. And we started to talk about this earlier. But the reason I am is not because all of them are bad. Right. But because I do have a big issue with the fact that there are a – there's a bad percentage of them who don't – they cover for the ones who are bad. You know what I mean? The wall of silence. Right. Exactly. The blue wall of I mean? The wall of silence. Right, exactly.

The blue wall of silence. And I think we touched on that when you and I were in here last, but to expand upon it. It's good to refresh. I try not to overgeneralize with it, but I find myself doing it. And he was a good guy to have in here

because through personal experience, by the way, he really doesn't like cops. He's definitely farther than i am and so i got to play like at least a little bit of devil's advocate right and one of the things he said is that there's a quote going around that they actually fucked up in this country which is that all cops are bastards he's like that's not what it was it emanated from europe and the quote was supposed to be the it was like the police system is bastardized right and then once he explained that it made more sense because he was saying the point

of that is he's like people make this bad apples argument he goes well if you have bad apples in a barrel they can't make all the other ones bad you know what i mean so he's like he's like when i say all cops i know some cops are okay. Obviously, I'm more biased. But that also means that like there's enough that are covering for the bad ones that we have a problem here. And so I think it's a similar thing to when you talk about Trump where people who may be projecting that for all the right reasons probably understand that there are some people who are projecting it for the wrong reasons too and don't talk about it what i would be very curious about though and you're right we didn't really see this i can't think of any examples on this to be honest with you but if pete let's say obama had lost to romney which that would have been hilarious if that happened right sorry but let's say he had lost him sure and you saw obama flags in 2013 2014

would we be judging them the same way we wouldn't know and and truthfully but i will say some of that's fair though some of that's fair well i would say the reason why is he i mean he actually was history right as the first black president of the united states there is an instance where it's like it's's history. But I mean, to play devil's advocate with myself, there are good people out there who support Trump for the reasons just like you said. Just, there was a conversation I had on another podcast, maybe it was with Josh, I don't remember. But I was saying, if I were a black person who had made it out of a really bad situation right and I was like a social worker and I might be changing the example right now but the idea is gonna be the

same and I dealt with people all the time who were judged on the basis of the color of their skin unfairly, I would consider it a sin against God to vote for Donald Trump. If I were a coal miner, and it's the most stereotypical example, but if I were a coal miner in West Virginia who had been not even given the courtesy to hear, go fuck yourself for the last 20 years from washington i would probably consider it a sin against god to not vote for donald trump and it underscores the point that i think you started this whole thing with which is that we deified the people right and the position but the people too and it really changed with trump and sanders and obviously trump won so it's on a whole nother level with him.

And that's what I was hoping to get across, adding to your point. And it's like that's the problem because a lot of these people will then eventually go along with that because they're told fuck you for doing it. But the motivations they have are based on where they're from and what they're about and not necessarily that this guy says stupid shit right because listen i'll admit i can point to a lot more from trump that he said really stupid that also could be viewed in a lot of different lenses that are not positive obama said shit like that too but i'm not going to hold him the same way i'm not going to hold him to that standard what i will say is that trump my biggest criticism of him is that when you have enough people telling you hey look i know you were like a new york real estate guy your whole life you kind of like not even president you're running for president now you can't say that right and you still say it there is a point where it becomes your fault yeah and so i don't have any sympathy for him but with

obama like same thing he just had much better control on it. And he does deserve a lot of credit for that. He was never, you never got a tweet from Obama along the lines of, if you don't vote for me, your suburbs are going to go away because they're going to bring in all the whatever low-income housing. You never got that from him. It's all really interesting, honestly. I don't know.

It's, like you said, there's a lot of nuance in the situation it's just hard for me to wrap my head around the whole thing because then you get into a game of what if that can go on forever yeah and you know what we're doing it with right now this whole afghanistan thing and it's kind of fucked up because and again i think you can have a lot of thoughts that contradict themselves on this and you should i think i think biden absolutely fucked up the the pull out here i think that's pretty clear i think that is horrific what's happening there and from a human from a humanitarian perspective it is devastating it is it's devastating just like those images that you talked about i mean yeah you can't argue with that you can't argue with that i think you can also say that obama and trump both had a

dream of pulling out of there that was clear and trump was able to actually a positive of his presidency was he was able to start putting the plans together to be able to do that and end this endless war because one thing about america we are awful nation builders so it's also not our job and so you know i i see a lot this week i do see some interesting tweets some funny tweets that point back to george bush but i don't see enough of that because it's like well where did this start and where did it start to go wrong and what we then turn it into in the cells in the media is like wow it's biden's fault or it's trump's fault right prisoner of the moment that's what we call that i and they all seize on it too they all blame each other none of them are innocent here you saw i mean trump doesn't have

any attention anymore because he was fucking censored but right it's a different issue but you know he came out on whatever the fuck and was blaming biden and biden came out and and and nudged trump and it's like okay like they're all political animals they're gonna do that but i see everyone breaking themselves up about it and suddenly everyone's an expert on afghanistan which they probably haven't thought of in like over a decade literally i've thought of it a little bit but i won't call myself an expert by any stretch of the imagination what i said i was like i'm i can't yeah man but it's a prime example of what we do with tribalism in politics now because it can never be like hey all right there's a lot fucked up here there's some things that like you know there were things

biden's speech the other night when he talked about i'm not going to pass this on to a fifth president i don't care if he was doing it for political points i do agree with that point yeah yeah absolutely absolutely i mean at the end of the day there there there are the way that we went about doing this was not necessarily the wrong way but if you're a hundred percent on one side or a hundred percent on the other side then you have no clue what you're talking about because the situation is so complex and And a lot of these situations are so complex. And so I try to put myself in that seat, making those decisions. And when you think about the decisions that Biden had to make, it's really unfair. But at the same time, I mean, he made the decision.

So he's got to sit with it. And he kind of said that. He kind of said, you know, the buck stops with me. I'm the president. I made the decision. You know, this is going to be on his legacy. And to a certain degree, it should. But I think what you're alluding to is that there was so much that led up to this. And he was put in an unfair situation.

And if you can't see that, you clearly don't understand what's going on yeah i i don't know how often i've said this but it should be said more often i i just don't at this point like data is data and i'm not sure you'll ever see a more i hope you'll never see a more damaging presidency by data on like an economic and social discourse presidency than george bush and i know people on the second part will say you're crazy because trump just happened i'm serious man everything ties back to finances and george bush got us in endless wars fucked up everything along the way and then managed to screw the economy in a way that hadn't been seen since the great depression and in a way was every bit as bad we just couldn't physically see it as much as you could in the

great depression because of resources that are available now but you know this whole buck i i can't help but think this week just be reminded again by how damaging that was and i know like a lot of it was dick cheney he still hired the guy right he still hired the guy and so sometimes i see us like fighting over you know these obama trump crowds and i'm like i mean jesus christ guys like oh look where this started yeah you know what i mean yeah and it just i don't know weeks like this make me sad because it reminds me that everything is going to be spun right right i already know that but like then you see it you see people falling off the helicopters or planes and you're like they're still spinning

it yeah you know it's sick which is why in all honesty and you can fault me for this the listeners can fault me for this but i just i don't listen and when you hit me up for another episode i would gladly i'll come on the show as many times as you'll have me, but I'm not keeping up with reading or watching current events because it's so sickening how it's spun. And it's really hard for me to watch any channel and feel like I'm giving information for information's sake with no agenda to it, right? And you talk about this a lot on your podcast and I don't want to beat a dead horse. Do it. But it's really hard for me to the point where I feel like the only way I can get my information is for Sydney to tell me and then it's like, okay, this is my fiance, I can argue with her

and tell her, oh, this doesn't make sense because of this. Because then it's like a filtered thing. Okay, she understood this article to mean this, I'll give pushback to her and I'm not fighting an organization. And that's truthfully how I get all of my information these days. I literally can't tell you the last time I've seen CNN or Fox News, not on TV, not in an article. It's too much. It's become to be information overload. And I kind of talked about this in the last episode I'm on. This is a plug for all of you who haven't watched the last episode to go watch episode 10. You know what? I was bad. It was early for me. This guy was a fucking pro. I still get compliments on that episode and it ain't because of me. Episode 10 was a good episode and I'm not

biased in saying that, brushing off the shoulder. But truthfully, I said this back then, lost the point, just like that. But the point that I'm trying to make is that there are so many silos out there that it's very hard to get your news unfiltered. Yes. And so, I got into a point where I'm just like, screw it all. I'll get the information that I get. When people tell me about certain things, when the thing about Haiti came up, just like you said, you would be remiss without talking about the situation in Afghanistan. I feel the same way about Haiti and the earthquake. I was devastated when I heard, and I heard it through Sydney. I didn't get the alert I didn't see it on the on the news or anything like that Sydney told me hey there

been an earthquake I reached out to the people that I knew who had family out there and I told them that I thought about them and that's really the only way I feel comfortable getting information because otherwise I feel like somebody is planting thoughts in my head and I'm not the type of guy that likes to feed to to to to get my information fed to me. I like to seek it out, and I like to filter it and to understand it and then to make my own opinions about it. I don't want someone else telling me, this is how you should think about something. And so few news sources give you that information unfiltered. And it's unfortunate, but that's how I feel today. And i know i'm not alone about it you're not but you're also too much of a rarity not that

other people aren't like that there are there are a lot more people than we think but that's why i value your perspective so so much and that's why you were so popular the first time you were on here and why people you know who found the show later went back and they're like this guy's fire because you do have a point of view you you fall on the liberal side of the spectrum which is exactly what i want i want people from the liberal and conservative sides and everyone in between on here but you have an ability to in a lawyerly way right build a case and understand what the other case is too and so that's why i and i'm i'm biased to say this but i'm i'm fucking right i'll die on this hill i hope that in the future guys like you will run for office even if everyone who's listening to this show wouldn't vote for you

like some of them wouldn't vote for you sure some of them would some of them wouldn't whatever would happen people might know that if you weren't corrupted by the power that goes into there which i'm sure some people do so don't fucking do that but you that if you weren't corrupted by the power that goes into there, which I'm sure some people do, so don't fucking do that. But, you know, if you weren't corrupted by that, like, they'll know, like, okay, this is a person that is going to listen to the ideas. And you know what, that was always something that made me a little more comfortable about Obama after the fact, because I did know somebody that my dad knew went to school with him at harvard and she talked about how and again this is in college a lot can change since then i'm sure it did but his mo at harvard was that in these rooms even back in the day people who were conservative would sit on the

right side right right liberal would sit on the left he would sit in the middle yeah and he it was clear he fell on the liberal side of the spectrum no doubt about it but he was the guy who would listen to everyone else and then restate the cases and even if he was taking the left side create it in a forum where everyone could appreciate it and see that they were heard and it's like when i look at people on the left and right side that's what i I want. That's more than – and unfortunately, that's not what sells anymore. No. I mean you even see it now.

Like one of the things that concerns me the most is cancel culture. Well, it's now started to infect both sides. It started left for years. Now it's right. You see Liz Cheney do what she did and she went to get and and you know i'm never gonna equate someone with their father let's get that straight they're a different person yeah i fucking hate dick cheney liz cheney's a different person right she does something that's unpopular whether you agree with it or not she took a stance on something

and they went to cancel her and i worry about this now because it's like they're going so far apart on these two sides that now they're they're meeting each other on the other side and to me when we start shutting down ideas or operating different opinions right that's a problem yeah it's it's really hard and I remember what I was going to say about episode 10 which was that I talked about making sure that you find your passion and advocate that passion and not being too afraid to be a generalist to say, oh, I know everything about all of these topics, rather than diving into a topic like for mine, it's social justice and making sure that the African American community can find some sort of equity. That is my passion. That's what I know. And so when Julian hit me up and was like, hey, I kind of want to talk about Afghanistan, I hit him up and I was like,

I know what's going on in Afghanistan, but I'm not an expert on this topic. And so I would feel uncomfortable to give an opinion about something that I haven't delved into, looked at resources on both sides, and then said, okay, this is my opinion on this thing. And that's kind of the thing that scares me the most about the president or presidencies and these debates, because I'm like, how can this person know everything about every topic? And that's what we expect of him or her when they go to these debates. And so, when people used to come up to me, even in college, and was like, oh, yeah, I can see Terrence becoming president.

I'm like, I don't know if I could see myself being president because I'm not going to sell myself out and pretend to know things that I don't know. And I'm not sure that our country is ready to vote for a guy as earnest as I'm going to be. I'm never going to be in a situation and give an opinion and say, oh yeah, I have an advisor. And in my head, I'm thinking, I have an advisor. My advisor says I should be this way on the world on drugs because it'll get me 100,000 more votes if I say that. If I haven't done that research myself, I'm not saying it. And as much as we as Americans like to think, oh, I want that guy as president, The truth is in the pudding. We don't have that.

Right now, the people that we put up in that seat are people that we think align with us in the most topics when realistically these views are not all coming from them. And that's just the realism of that situation. Bro, I think you just unknowingly pointed out not the whole reason, but a big reason of the psychology of why trump won oh yeah 100 because all these other guys they'll speak to you they'll give you the the politician face goes on there and they're like you know we're looking at this very very closely and you have to understand the people of whatever country think this this and they'll start to go on all these donnie trump seemed like a human being donald trump i will never forget when i want to say it was john harwood in a debate during like the primaries asked him about cuba and you see his face if a face could take a shit a face took a

shit and he just looks at him and then suddenly like he goes into game mode and he's like like listening to the question and for like 45 seconds he repeated in some different fashion the line of you know cuba is a great country we're looking at it we have a lot of smart people i know a lot of smart people we're doing great things obviously castro bad dictator but we're we're doing some things here we're looking into it i'm gonna get it john john, John, John. I'm going to get the best people. I'm going to get the best people on it. Little marker over here.

He doesn't have the best people. I have the best people. We will look into it and I will get, John, John, I will get back to you. John, I'm going to get back to you. And like, he filled that air. And even if people at home like, no, like that guy just took a verbal shit on TV.

They're like, oh, that's just like me. I don't fucking know what's going on in cuba right and so what's amazing is his unqualification of not looking into some issues which some things where cuba maybe isn't one of them because it was a smaller issue but other things it's like yeah you probably should have looked into that it actually had the reverse psychological effect of people being like, this motherfucker is just like me. Let's do it. And that should be a big red light to all politicians going, you know what? I don't have to know everything.

That's my hope. Truthfully, that is my hope. And that is one thing that I saw about that where I thought like when I saw Trump become president, like you would think if I saw, as I saw Obama become president, I was like, damn, if Obama could do it, I could do it. But I mean, I had that thought to a certain degree, but like, I've never kind of like been like, oh, I like, like I need for there to be a first in order for me to do something. Like, I kid you not, like it felt like every day, I'm sure it was probably like once a month, maybe even once a year, my mom would always say to me, Terrence, what are you going to be the first black? And I was a kid. Yeah.

And so I was always taught to be a trailblazer. So I never really ascribed to that like, oh, Obama did it, now we can all do it. That's not been my reality. That's not been the way that I was raised. I was raised to be a leader and to be the first of whatever. But when Donald Trump did it, I was like, damn, if that idiot could be president, why can't I? Truthfully. And that speaks exactly to what you're saying. He was a great marketer. Absolutely. And actually, I'll give him credit for that in his career. He's one of the most brilliant marketer businessmen of all time that guy was worth minus 750 million dollars at one point and became a billionaire yeah he did that because he's a brilliant marketer him and the kardashians exactly dude yo kardashians yo this by the way different context very different same

wavelength man hundred percent and that's that's the thing about society. And part of that is a shot at society. We are, I think, you know what? I actually think it was Steve Bannon that said this first, who's kind of a crazy person. But he was right about this one thing. I remember reading that he said back in like when Breitbart was still alive, he was like, everything's downstream from culture. And he was dead ass right about that

because what we proved is that even the oval office is downstream from culture you can elect the guy who was a reality tv star who you know was trying to fuck models right right like that's that's what we did right and so now like you hear people calling for the rock to run for president no seriously i like the rock a lot kanye or kanye come on you had an episode on kanye you can't throw you can't you can't leave him out of this conversation kanye we're sitting right across from me i say bro you are a fucking genius when kanye when kanye's sitting across from me i like how you're thinking come on i'm always looking out for me come on i'm saying when he's sitting across from me i'll be like i fucking love you yeah you understand there's no

planet where i where i would ever vote you for president yeah like i'd love to see how he answered that because it's like it also takes like a certain and this could be a negative too it takes a certain type of person like there's a lot of negatives to that but it's also you have to have some level of pragmatism to you like a pure creative you know i wouldn't vote michelangelo president right you know the guy who painted the sistine chapel sure that's the guy who's constantly looking at what if i did that you know what i mean and in a way like you have to be decisive yes afghanistan proved that yes and so with trump he was a marketer but he was also like this nope this is how i'm gonna do it

and like if there is one thing and not to turn the topic here but let's turn the fucking topic always turn the topics if there is one thing that i think will be very interesting to see in the context of history as to who comes after him and what they try to do one positive about trump that was also a huge negative for him just depended on the situation is that he didn't give a fuck so all of these established orders of business and government all these agencies these bureaucracies who are used to hey we were here before you got here we're going to be here after you leave yeah yeah he kind of had nothing to lose with them and it hurt him you know telling the cia to go fuck themselves probably doesn't help you but it also made him

it also helped him at least point out that we do have some problems right group think there right you know and that's why during the swamp became such a big slogan took the words out of my mouth yep and so i mean as far as you look at, we've gone back to the established order kind of right now. And in a way. For now. For now. In a way, I get that. Yeah.

But looking long term here, I do think about the power of bureaucracies a lot and like the unknown things. And you're always someone who's advocating for the rights of individuals and to freedom and things like that and i don't think that stops in fact i know it doesn't stop with just like rights based on who you are as a human not the color of your skin not your gender whatever it also goes to all of us like what are our rights in the eyes of a government body what are our rights in our own home and so you know obviously you've seen a lot during covet and everything but you can tie it all the way back to like what edward snowden pointed out what the government was doing and now you look

at a guy like trump who went in to drain the swamp kind of left a part of the swamp swamp in my opinion right and now we're full swamp again and it's like is that gonna affect our agency as individuals in the future i don't know so i i don't know about the agency but i'll tell you this um one thing that i'm definitely excited for is this new generation to come into power and and kind of like the old generation to phase out because the one thing that excites me about this new generation that's coming up, right? I have, I'm the oldest of my siblings. My youngest siblings are twins.

They're 15 years old. So I kind of get a taste of that culture, that 15 year old culture is that they're so politicized right now because of the media and everything. It's so far reaching, whether it be TikTok or Instagram or Facebook, whatever their social media of choice, they have it in front of them. So they're forced to think about topics that we weren't thinking about until college. They're thinking about it in middle school. My siblings knew about Trump and Obama and the

importance of their presidencies at such a young age, that it's interesting and it's fascinating and I'm excited about this new generation to come in and be disruptors. Honestly, that's what they are. I haven't watched the documentary, but I've seen commercials for the one with Greta, the young, I think she's Russian maybe or Siberian? I think she's Swedish or something. Swedish, very far off. But an advocate at a very young age. And I apologize for not knowing.

And again, I don't really know much about her story. I haven't watched her documentary. I haven't watched her documentary. I can never get over that. I haven't watched her documentary and i don't know much about her story but from the commercials that i've seen on hulu because i get commercials because i pay for the cheapest subscription as possible um the commercials that i've seen i've seen that she is advocating on a international platform from an extremely young age and i'm not sure that when we

were that age we saw that as much. And so- Oh, we didn't. No. We didn't. No. There's no way. I mean, the media platforms that were available when we were that age were not the same. And so, we have this generation of thinkers, and she's not the only one, she's just the

first one that comes to my mind, of advocates from the ages of middle school who know about these grand things like global warming and know enough about them to draw the attention of even adults who are willing to disrupt the culture and are willing to say, we understand that's how it's always been, but this is the way that we think it should be. The ability to have that thought process at an age like that, I can only imagine once they get to the age of 35 which is the age that you can run for presidency see I think I think I'm kind of good with it too

because I think there's good and bad and I think we're going to have to root it out so like with her I see both because her general position of global warming I agree with again I don't know it I think that the way that she goes about the extremism of some of it i don't and then i have to remind myself oh

she's fucking 13 and i think i think she's also talked about she has like asperger's or something which probably makes her a genius by the way yeah but it's like you know there can like some of the explanation of like the aggressive personality on, that makes sense in that way. Right. But it's interesting to me because the idea that, like, a 13-year-old is going to be politically aware is a crazy thought. But it's true. And you get to see that. And it's true on a large scale.

Yeah. It's true on a large scale. I mean, you want to talk about cancel culture? There's no doubt in my mind that 13 year olds are driving that culture you know what actually i get to tell you right now you're wrong i know i was surprised by this too all right all right i was stunned by this too i would have i would have said the same thing you did about three weeks ago so unless this data is wrong okay you're wrong but there was a poll done and i will maybe i'll put this on a story or something because i can't pull it up right now but i i've shared it with a bunch of people so i'm comfortable talking about it there was a poll done

that talked about favoritism of cancel culture by generation so it had gen z millennials gen x and boomers boomers obviously was the lowest the second lowest was gen z and it was pretty close the highest by far was millennials and it goes to show you what's happened here is i'd like to see that because because i can say as a person that has seen 15 year olds and i I don't know what the Gen Z cutoff, maybe they're the next generation. No, they're still born. I figured they were in it. They're at the back end of it, yeah.

But what I've seen is that they're, I mean, like my siblings and their friends are quick to be like, oh yeah, I don't like Billie Eilish because she pretends to be bisexual so that she can get views and followers and that nature, but realistically she's heterosexual. These are real things that 14-year-olds are saying. You're sucking the hope out of me, man.

They're saying these things, you know what I mean? And so maybe they're not calling it cancel culture, and I wouldn't be surprised if that survey does not survey 14-year-olds. I mean, that's pretty young maybe they do that's a good question to ask i think they do go younger but okay that is a good so i mean i'd like to see i would love to see it after this podcast is over just for my own edification because that's my experience again i can't speak for all people uh who are gen z but my experience is that they're actively involved in it, then again, I will say, like I said, they're twins. One is definitely highly in favor of cancel culture.

The other twin is highly against it. So to your point. That's interesting. Maybe. That's like almost scientifically weird, but that's cool. Yeah. Well, one's a male, one's a female. So I don't know if that plays into it too.

Wow. You really fucked me up with that. I don't know. And let's, I do got to look at the ages on that because i don't know if they had a cut off that's a great question to ask we'll look at it together that's why you're here and all of you guys go out and look at it too yes please as always don't believe everything you hear on here because we're guessing just like you are in some ways that's right but i think that the awareness can be good it's just a question of where do they take it to because look my opinion is i might even call it extreme in today's culture it shouldn't be but it is i i want everyone to live out there and when they cross the line of

free speech get rid of them you know so prime example i've cited this a million times. I'll say it's a perfect example. Steve Bannon was banned from, I think, like all the platforms back in whatever. Okay. Six months ago, something like that. Absolutely should have been. Fully supported it. Because Steve Bannon went across free speech. He called for the direct harm and death to public individuals in a visual way with a platform. That's not free speech that's

violence sure so my thought is you give everyone from the farthest left to the farthest right a platform and then the minute they they actually cross it you take it down which is why i also had a problem with the trump one because i don't know if you read the first of all i i think the slippery slope of banning a president from a platform is enormous. I literally think there should be a higher standard there for them doing it, but that's a separate issue. If you actually read why they banned him, it's one of the most comical pieces of literature I've ever read in my life. They – Twitter can read minds apparently. They admitted it to me in their in their argument and again this is a prime example of where you're making me defend trump right i

shouldn't have to you dude i want people who who say moronic things right where i can see them right that's where i want them and now i can't see it but you know what i want them right there and so i see this with the culture of people trying to say like certain things should go as certain things shouldn't if it crosses that line of violence get it the fuck out of here because crazy people follow crazy things right right but if it is terrorism yeah i mean let's call it what it is and i know that's what you're what you're getting at that's 100 i don't like to go extreme but i will call it that because i mean it is it is a level of

that when you're inciting violence that is terrorism because basically what you're saying is your platform or your viewpoint or you're saying whatever it is that i don't like about you makes you deserve violence against you and thus you should change it and thus you are using terror to change someone that's terrorism by definition fair okay so let's let's call it that and let's call it what steve bannon did a a part of that family right there get rid of it when people are giving ideas even if they are hateful ideas which do exist by the way a lot of them beat them with facts man yeah i mean it's just like it's just like uh interracial marriage is a good example prime example yeah if if someone wants to argue against that do it man do it right in the public square

where i can see you because i'm gonna beat you in about five seconds jerking off while i'm doing it 100 as a visual i'm sorry but you know what i mean it is so easy to beat that argument yeah and yet we cultivated the society that seems to say and i think i think this is what they want to drive but it seems to say oh we don't want to risk that we can't beat a bad argument so let's get rid of it and what they don't see is the slippery slope of that and what that can do and that's how like the re i know the the hosts didn't get banned like the two host page but like thecare podcast, which is a left-wing podcast. They are, and I'm generalizing here, but they are two feminists who talk to people of all different backgrounds, but they're clearly feminists.

And they do have pushback against like the overrunning of transgender culture affecting women. Right. the overrunning of transgender culture affecting women right they were banned quietly during the whole banning of like all the conservatives and and trump during january and whatever and that is a prime example to me of where does it stop where's the line in where's and that's all and realistically law school that's really the only thing that you're learning from a uh leader legal scholars perspective is they teach you to ask that question okay you believe this thing where does it stop that's what judges are faced with on a daily basis right and that's what the supreme court has to look at that's the tough questions that we have in america we believe in freedom of speech. Where do we want to draw that line?

Does it go unlimited, including terrorism? Do we stop it at terrorism? Do we stop it a little beforehand? These are the questions that we have to ask ourselves as Americans. And these are the things that we have to think about. And I can understand all perspectives. It's just, it's incredibly difficult. I personally align myself with what you're saying i think terrorism should stop because we don't want to cause harm to other americans at the end of the day big picture under no circumstance should we be trying to bring about violence against other americans i think when we get into like racism it brings up the question of what is harm? Is harm only physical? Like you're telling someone else to hurt physically someone else? Or does harm go with emotions? And that's why it is a slippery slope. And that's why what you said I can agree with is that it's a slippery slope.

Because realistically, harm has been done to black people for such a long time. And when you think about the N-word, for example, and that word affects different people in different ways. Me personally, Terrence, I've never, and I can say that it is a rarity. There are no words in the English or any other language that could ever affect me in that way. There's no one- But you can understand why people feel differently. But I can understand why people can feel differently. That was going to be my end point.

No, no, no, 100%. Terrence Jones, the way that I was raised, the way the man that I am today, the security that I have in myself is such that there's nothing anyone could say to me to ever bring me out of myself, but that's not to say that the same isn't true for someone else. And so, where do we draw that line? Do we say that harm can only be physical? Do we say that harm can be emotional? Or do we say we don't care about harm, free speech is free speech, I say what I want? It's hard. It really really difficult i think if you're on the line of emotional unfortunately you do have to deal with it because once you go down that slope you're done you're already on the slope the conversation is the slope no that's no that's that's that's true and and it doesn't by

the way doesn't mean i like it there's a famous line that a lot of people have said where it's like, I may hate everything you say, but I will fight for your right to say provided it isn't violence. Right. I do agree with that because like I saw one, there was like a KKK parade somewhere, like maybe Georgia or something. This has got to be like nine ten months ago and people on social media of all races were retweeting the video and dragging it making fun of it it was great because it was like look at these fucking morons in the middle and they weren't causing any violence they were just speaking their hate speech at the time look at these fucking morons in there nothing else needed to be said everyone anyone with half a

brain understood that at the time and i was like that is a prime example of things working and it even goes back to like the acle aclu they started their whole organization as crazy as this sounds fighting for the rights of nazis to do a parade that was one of the stories yeah yeah and like they you can't tell me they like their clients they didn't they stand for everything those people don't but they were saying okay you got to find the perfect plaintiff yes at the end of the day or the perfect defendant you have to find and that's how you that's how you move the needle and there's a lot of cases where you'd be surprised with the defendant who the defendants were that pushed different social issues in different directions for um the supreme court based off of who they are and that's what the aclu is very good at is finding that having an end goal and disregarding who they

use to get to that end goal and it really is amazing dude that that's the perfect spot to end it yeah yeah awesome man i i wait i waited i waited to bring in a little bit it's like there are certain people on this podcast you i'll name a couple names you mike spear and jim diorio are people that like my battle is don't bring them in too much but you're you're fucking awesome man and i hope as i said last time i hope we have leaders in society who think like you. And even if they're from, you know, we're going to have people who are from different realms of the political aisles. You know, I want to burn down both two parties.

But I'm saying, like, we're always going to have different opinions regardless of whether it's three or four or whatever. I want people who think about people and are willing to listen to different ideas and who are also willing to stand behind beliefs when they have them. And you check all those boxes. I've known you my whole life. And it's just, it's pretty awesome that we started this podcast for real, for real with you. And like I said, I'm crazy here. We'll see where this goes, but you're coming with me. The truth is that we started the podcast with you and everyone that comes on this podcast believes in you. And the reason why is because you're not someone that just talks the talk. You look up what you're talking about and you know what you're talking about. And that's why we are here. At the end of the day, you're a great host. This podcast is something that I believe in that

hundreds of other people believe in. And we're glad to have someone like you to generate these conversations because without it, people get lost in those cycles. People get lost in those silos and, and, and it's very easy to get lost in America. So I appreciate you. Love you, brother. Dude. Cheers. Cheers. Thanks for doing it. Everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me peace